When your own mother becomes an imposter; tales from a neuroscientist

CHENNAI: When there is a small damage to a specific part of the brain, you may not feel an affordable reduction of all your mental capacity. “You don't get a blunting of your mind in this damage to a small part of your brain. What you get is a specific loss, a highly selective loss, of a specific function. Other functions are being preserved intact,” said noted neuroscientist V S Ramachandran.“This gives you some confidence in asserting that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function.”
Ramachandran said there are many examples for this, and prosopagnosia, a cognitive disorder of face perception, is one. “This happens when there is damage to the temporal lobe and the fusiform gyrus, which is involved in recognising objects such as faces, letters, alphabets and numbers. If the fusiform gyrus is damaged, the person will experience face blindness,” said Ramachandran, while speaking on “How the brain represents space, time and numbers” at the virtual Indology Festival organised by the Tamil Heritage Trust in the city recently.
“He will say, ‘I don’t know who you are’. It could be his mother, but he doesn’t recognise her. What eludes him is the identity. So that place is involved in perception of faces. Its primary function is in that,” he said. If you are a shepherd, then sheep. Different sheep. “It’s not entirely innate. It is learnt, partly. There is a module dedicated to learning about individual objects such as their functions and names and classifying them,” he added.
However, another far less well known syndrome by the way is prosopagnosia by proxy. “When he recognises you by voice but doesn’t know it’s you when he sees you. He looks in a mirror and says, ‘that doesn’t look like me.’ He is a patient. But when he says, ‘when I wink, it winks back. So, it must be a mirror.’ He is not stupid, he is intelligent. He knows that he has got a brain damage and that he can’t properly recognise his own face,” said Ramachandran, author of the best-selling book titled “Phantoms in the Brain.”
Another syndrome, said Ramachandran, is called Capgras syndrome. “I had a patient who said he looked at his mother and father and saw his mother as an impostor. She is not his real mother and he doesn’t feel any warmth or any affection. He told me that it’s a strange woman pretending to be my mother. What is surprising about this delusion is that they are highly selective in nature. He is not mentally disturbed in any way and not a psychotic. But when it comes to his mother, he says that she is an impostor,” he said. What’s wrong here?
A standard view of Capgras syndrome is where a person is denying that his mother is his mother is may be a Freudian one. “According to Fraud, when we are little babies, we have a strong sexual attraction towards our mothers. I don’t believe in this. He said as you grow up, the cortex develops, the higher thinking areas of your brain inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother. Thank God, otherwise, you would be sexually attracted every time you see your mother,” said Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego.
Because the cortex develops and inhibits these reflect towards your mother. Now, when a blow comes to your head, the cortical inhibition is removed, and the latent sexual urges come flaming into the surface. And suddenly, inexplicably, you may be sexually turned on your mother so you say, ‘This can’t be my mother. This must be some other woman who looks like my mother,’ This is a very convoluted, strange description characteristic of Sigmund Freud. Very ingenious but implausible,” said Ramachandran.