Imagine being able to feel everything another person is feeling - their pleasure and their pain. Or being convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you're dead. These are just a few of the strange brain disorders that have plagued a rare set of people over the years.

Oliver Sacks' classic book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat introduced us to some of the strangest brain disorders people suffer from, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few of the most bizarre mental conditions out there.


1. Cotard's syndrome: this disorder makes people think that they're dead.
Mr. B was a 65-year-old retired teacher with no family history of mental illness, when he suddenly began having sad moods, stopped being able to feel pleasure, slept and ate less, and developed feelings of worthlessness. He later started having delusions that his organs had stopped working and his house was going to fall down. After an attempted suicide, he started believing he was dead.
This man suffered from a condition known as
Cotard's syndrome (or Walking corpse syndrome), in which a patient thinks he or she is dead. Counterintuitively, in more than half of cases, these patients also think they are immortal. Treatment for the condition can include antidepressant or antipsychotic drugs, or electroconvulsive therapy.


2. Prosopagnosia: some people can't remember others' faces.
The writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts the story of a man who "mistook his wife for a hat". He suffered from a condition where he couldn't recognise faces, known as
prosopagnosia , or face blindness. (Sacks himself has a moderate version of the condition.)
Depending on how severe the case, a person may have a hard time recognising just familiar faces, telling strangers' faces apart, or even telling a face apart from an object. Some people with prosopagnosia can't even recognise their own face. The condition is usually caused by stroke, but as much as 2.5 percent of people may be born with it.

3. Mirror-touch synaesthesia: this disorder makes people feel what other people are feeling.
On an episodes of the NPR show, Invisibilia , a woman who wished to remain anonymous reported that when she sees people being hugged, she feels like she's getting a hug herself. When she sees someone get hurt, she feels pain in the same place as they do. And she can't watch people eat, because she feels like they're shoving food in her mouth.
Amanda suffers from a rare condition called mirror-touch synesthesia that makes her able to physically 'feel' what others around her are feeling. Although she was born this way, other people have acquired the ability after having a stroke, or a limb amputated (which can lead to sensations in a 'phantom' limb ). The first case of this condition was reported in 2005 , and there have only been a handful of other reports since then.

4. Capgras delusion: people with this condition think a loved one has been replaced by an imposter.
After giving birth, a 36-year-old woman developed the delusion that her son and other family members had been replaced by imposters. The delusion persisted for five years, and every treatment doctors tried failed. Finally, the woman was given electroconvulsive therapy (in which electrical shocks are passed through the brain to induce a seizure), and her psychiatric symptoms subsided.
The woman suffered from what is known as the
Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome, where you think loved ones have been substituted by imposters, robots or aliens. It usually occurs in patients with paranoid schizophrenia, but has also been seen in patients with a brain injury or dementia. It's also more common in women than men (by a ratio of 3:2).

5. Alien hand syndrome: some people are convinced their hand doesn't belong to them.
An 82-year-old woman suffered a stroke, and upon recovering about six weeks later, she reported that her left arm did not belong to her. Instead, she was convinced the limb belonged to her brother, who had been with her when she experienced the stroke. She felt as if the arm would not do what she wanted it to do.

This was a case of alien hand syndrome, a rare disorder.

culled from : www.sciencealert.com

Hmmm