電影、書評、隨筆

Author:       Oliver W. Sacks Subject:       Neurology Publisher:    New York: Simon & Schuster Year:            1998 ISBN:           9780684853949 A classic piece in brain science written by renowned late psychologist Oliver Sacks. The book consists of a dozen bizarre clinical cases of brain malfunctioning encountered by Dr Sacks, as illustrated by the book title. While some of these cases are due to congenital defects, some of them are due to head injury and some due to brain tumor or diseases. All in all, I find the most intriguing the case of anterograde amnesia, as manifested by the severely handicapped Jimmie G. in the The Lost Mariner . The stark contrast between his memory deficiency and his intact intellectual ability is fascinating to behold. This reminds me of the iconic patient H.M. as documented in every memory and cognition textbook, the ...

(N.B. This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of the Mensa World Journal , the official publication of Mensa International.) In the comic Naruto , there is a character who cannot remember other people's faces, and he is usually being made fun out of that. It may well be that this idea stemmed from somebody whom the author had encountered. Indeed, there is a formal medical term for this disability in the real world – prosopagnosia . Prosopagnosia, or face blindness in laymen terms, is a condition where individuals have difficulties in identifying people's faces. Of course, everybody has some problems with remembering faces at times, so the condition can be understood as performing below a certain threshold of a spectrum of varying degrees of facial recognition abilities. However, if you are prosopagnosiac you would easily have problems with following the dialogues of protagonists in a movie, and rely heavily on non-facial features such as hair style,...