Impaired Vision. How the Visual World May Change after Brain Damage

Preface

Chapter 1 Looking at the Brain
1.1.A Short History
1.2.The Brain
1.3. This Book and the Patients in It

Chapter 2 Blind
2.1. A Blind Eye
2.2. A Blind Brain
2.3. Blind Visual Fields
2.4. Imagined Vision

Chapter 3 Partially Blind
3.1. Where Is It?
3.2. Line Orientation
3.3. Seeing Stroboscopically
3.4. Shapelessness
3.5. A Black-and-White World
3.6. Rough and Matte or Smooth and Glossy

Chapter 4 Looking but Not Seeing
4.1. Wavelength Without Color
4.2. Day or Night?
4.3. Seeing Without Reading and Strange Connections
4.4. What Is That?
4.5. Lost and an Unfamiliar House
4.6. Face Failures and a Family Affair
4.7. I Can't See Why You Sound Angry and Two Swiss Ladies
4.8. Classic Syndromes of the Parietal Lobe

Chapter 5 Seeing Things Differently
5.1. Bringing Color to the World
5.2. Moldy Faces and Fish Heads
5.3. Dislodged Vision
5.4. Repetitive Vision
5.5. Lost Feelings

Chapter 6 Seeing What Is Not There
6.1. Bright Sparks
6.2. Lively Perception in Poor Vision
6.3. Filling in the Empty Spaces
6.4. Neglected but Not Forgotten
6.5. Electrified Perceptions
6.6. Hallucinations Resulting from Degenerative Disease
6.7. Visual Hallucinations in Psychiatric Conditions
6.8. Strange Desires

Chapter 7 Knowing the Unseen
7.1. Sight Unseen
7.2. Split Brain
7.3. Pointing in the Right Direction
7.4. Vision Without Awareness
7.5. Ignored but Not Forgotten

Chapter 8 Oblivion
8.1. Seneca's Trouble
8.2. Anosognosia
8.3. Neglect Revisited
8.4. Lost Colors
8.5. My Oil Paintings
8.6. Forgetting Your Amnesia

Chapter 9 Vision
9.1. Scope of the Visual Brain
9.2. Stages of Vision
9.3. Damage, Deficits, Distortions, and Delusions
9.4. Consciousness
9.5. Looking Back

An unprecedented book that discusses a decades long journey of understanding vision and visual impairment through working with patients with brain damage!

Edward de Haan, a noted clinical vision researcher for the last 35 years, explains how the healthy brain deals with visual information and reveals how he learned to appreciate what it means to be visually impaired. Through discussions of fascinating case studies, he shows that visual deficits are individually unique. Some patients perceive the world without color, some see objects in a distorted manner, whilst others will claim that they can still see although they are demonstrably blind.

The author details his experiences with these patients to demonstrate the manner in which patient work is a unique and vital part of discovering how the brain processes visual information. In doing so, Impaired Vision offers a review of the clinical symptoms related to visual impairment and highlights that the patient study method has not lost any of its relevance in our increasingly high-tech world. This important book:

• Explores the various clinical phenomena in visual impairment after brain damage
• Demonstrates the effectiveness of the patient study method for understanding visual deficits after brain damage
• Contains comprehensive coverage of the variety of symptoms that are manifest in patients with visual impairment
• Includes compelling case studies of visually impaired patients

Written for a general audience but of interest for students, researchers and clinicians, Impaired Vision contains fascinating case studies that offer an understanding of the symptoms that are associated with visuals deficits of brain damage.