A CURIOUS CASE OF NEGLECT
Mr. McKnight urges his wife to hurry. He is anxious to drive her to the doctor. The middle-aged, previously-healthy homemaker has been acting strangely over the last week, staring vacantly into space, expressing no interest in her usual activities, exhibiting mood swings that are atypical for her, and walking around the house (and nearly out of it before he stopped her) partially undressed.
Cranking the car, he notices that his spouse has walked out the door without a shoe on her right foot. Mr. McKnight’s worry – and truth be known, his impatience – are growing as she sits down in the passenger seat but leaves her right leg still hanging out of the car, bare foot planted on the driveway. Forget about the shoe, he decides.
“C’mon, Honey, go ahead and get in the car so we can leave,” he implores.
In reply she stares at him quizzically and replies: “I am ready to go.”
Reaching across her lap, he gives her leg a gentle tug, trying to appear cheerful, with the coaxing tone he would direct at a child.
“C’mon now, let’s get your leg in the car and close the door.”
The leg does not budge. Mrs. McKnight stares straight ahead without a hint of either distress or stubbornness, or even the playfulness that might signal a joke – just detachment.
Now there is a needling in Mr. McKnight’s voice, an irritation borne of rising fear.
“Whose leg is this, then?” he challenges, tapping her thigh repeatedly.
At last her head does turn, looking at her own right leg, then swiveling to meet his gaze, indifference frozen on her face. “I don’t know.”
MISSING THE MESSAGE
As a physician I constantly encounter people who do not perceive very real input from their surroundings. Mrs. McKnight puzzlingly omitted pulling her right leg into the car. She also neglected to comb the right side of her head and dress the right side of her body. Other patients like her have even left the food on half of their plate untouched!
A brain tumor in her left parietal lobe caused a condition of right-sided neglect we refer to as “hemiagnosia.” She experienced a baffling unawareness of her right side, literally failing to recognize it as part of “herself,” leading to complete disregard for half of her own body.
Interestingly, this awareness of self, while seemingly obvious and inherent to all sentient creatures, has proven to be one of the most difficult qualities to program into robots. They do not recognize themselves, regarding their own parts instead as simply disconnected objects in the environment.
EQUIPPED FOR THE JOB
Our bodies are bristling with an array of senses, far surpassing the five that we often cite, and we can detect much more than we might consciously recognize. For instance, take the sensation we call touch. Though often referred to as a single sense, “touch” is really several distinct capabilities.
Your skin, filled with at least five different kinds of specialized nerves, can differentiate a dull sensation, like the light touch of a finger, from the sharp prick of a needle and can easily determine whether something is smooth or rough, hot or cold, wet or dry.
There is even an unconscious dimension of touch, which has literally guided every step of your life. When your eyes are closed, you don’t immediately begin to wonder where, for example, your left foot is. You can “feel” it. Proprioception is what provides this feeling. Proprioception is a position sense – the ability to perceive the location of a body part.
DULLED SENSES
Of course, this battery of senses can fail us. And in addition to being unaware, we can also be in denial of our deficits. For instance, one older gentleman began bumping into objects – to the dismay of his family, but apparently not himself. In fact, he emphasized that he felt well and that nothing was wrong with him. In his rare condition, known as Anton’s blindness, there is damage (from a stroke, injury, or tumor) to the occipital cortex – the vision center at the back of the brain.
The result is a patient with completely normal eyes and optic nerves, but the inability to process all the visual signals at the level of the brain, leading essentially to blindness. The most fascinating (and distressing) aspect of Anton’s blindness is that the patient may adamantly insist that he can see normally, so that his blindness often initially escapes the notice of family and doctors. Truly these patients “see” but do not “perceive.”
UNDER OUR NOSES
I have portrayed two examples of deficient sensation. Now let me tell you about a case of superhuman sensing ability – or if not superhuman, at least non-human. Periodically my dog Sergeant, moved by some hidden impulse, rouses from rest. Placing his hound’s snout at the crack beneath the door, he deeply sniffs in outdoor air, while quivering with excitement.
Sometimes he retires to his bed, satisfied that all is well in his domain. At other times he begs to go out, then charges barking into the yard. We neither see, hear, nor smell what all the fuss has been about, but our pet’s amazing nose informs his canine brain of unseen events unfolding outside: a neighbor’s dog out for a walk or an insolent cat straying into his territory. Sergeant experiences through a keen sense of smell a world to which we are completely oblivious.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have such a gift? What could we be missing? When people speak of communing with God or when you see their rapturous faces during some powerful worship experience, do you ever feel that you are missing something that should be obvious? Could there be a universe of divine knowledge under our noses? In the next series of posts I hope to demonstrate how and what the created order is affirming about God, sharpening our spiritual senses to the divine messages around us. That is what I would like for us to sniff out together!