Neuroscience
Imagine if your whole world suddenly went back to front, so that the left-hand side of things appeared on the right and vice versa. That's what happened to a 33-year-old woman, known by psychologists as PR, after a pneumonia-induced coma led her to suffer widespread brain damage.
As PR gradually recovered from her illness, many of her faculties returned to normal, but still she could not read. But then her son noticed that she was able to read perfectly well if he held text up against a mirror. Now Tobias Pflugshaupt and colleagues have observed PR's performance on a number of tests, and found her world appears to be entirely mirror-reversed.
Not only does PR read and write in mirror-reversed fashion, with both letters and whole words reversed, she also finds it easier to tell the time from mirror-reversed clocks, and when asked to draw objects, she portrays them back-to-front. She even reaches for everyday objects such as doors as if they were positioned the other way around from reality. Intriguingly, PR's problem disappears if stimuli are presented to her only very briefly (less than 200ms) – something she had noticed at a nightclub under flashing lights.
The researchers said the case shows how unstable our sense of left and right is – a notion reinforced by the fact young children often confuse left and right and sometimes produce mirror-reversed righting when learning to write. “Generally, mirrored vision can be regarded as an extreme clinical manifestation of this instability”, they said.
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Pflugshaupt, T., Nyffeler, T., von Wartburg, R., Wurtz, P., Luthi, M., Hubl, D., Gutbrod, K., Juengling, F.D., Hess, C.W. & Muri, R.M. (2007). When left becomes right and vice versa: Mirrored vision after cerebral hypoxia. Neuropsychologia, 45, 2078-2091.
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Neuroscience
The woman who sees the world back to front
Imagine if your whole world suddenly went back to front, so that the left-hand side of things appeared on the right and vice versa. That's what happened to a 33-year-old woman, known by psychologists as PR, after a pneumonia-induced coma led her to suffer widespread brain damage.As PR gradually recovered from her illness, many of her faculties returned to normal, but still she could not read. But then her son noticed that she was able to read perfectly well if he held text up against a mirror. Now Tobias Pflugshaupt and colleagues have observed PR's performance on a number of tests, and found her world appears to be entirely mirror-reversed.
Not only does PR read and write in mirror-reversed fashion, with both letters and whole words reversed, she also finds it easier to tell the time from mirror-reversed clocks, and when asked to draw objects, she portrays them back-to-front. She even reaches for everyday objects such as doors as if they were positioned the other way around from reality. Intriguingly, PR's problem disappears if stimuli are presented to her only very briefly (less than 200ms) – something she had noticed at a nightclub under flashing lights.
The researchers said the case shows how unstable our sense of left and right is – a notion reinforced by the fact young children often confuse left and right and sometimes produce mirror-reversed righting when learning to write. “Generally, mirrored vision can be regarded as an extreme clinical manifestation of this instability”, they said.
_________________________________
Pflugshaupt, T., Nyffeler, T., von Wartburg, R., Wurtz, P., Luthi, M., Hubl, D., Gutbrod, K., Juengling, F.D., Hess, C.W. & Muri, R.M. (2007). When left becomes right and vice versa: Mirrored vision after cerebral hypoxia. Neuropsychologia, 45, 2078-2091.
- Mirror Writing: What Does It Reflect About How We All Write?
Our story starts with a wheeze: a schoolboy punished with lines saves time by wielding two pens at once. Exploring the ease with which he can play with writing, what began as a diversion eventually becomes an artistic practice that incorporates mirrored...
- Your Brain Unscrambles Words In The Mirror But Then Switches Them Back Again
We humans can recognise things from different angles and orientations. As Jon Duñabeitia and his colleagues observe in their new paper, a tiger is still a tiger whether you see it facing rightwards or leftwards. When it comes to words, though, this skill...
- Why Gym Design Is All Wrong
Walk into any gym these days and you're confronted by a bank of exercise machines facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Yet new research suggests this could be the worse possible set-up for sedentary women braving the gym for the first time....
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You have to feel sorry for goalkeepers. While strikers take all the glory for scoring goals, keepers only tend to get noticed when they make mistakes. Well now a little bit of goalkeeping help is at hand from an unlikely source: economic psychology. Ofer...
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From The New York Times:Who's That Strange Monkey in the Mirror? By NICHOLAS WADE The New York Times Published: July 26, 2005 Humans, the great apes and, probably, dolphins share an intellectual skill unusual in the animal world: they recognize...