(1.)The term anosognosia originally referred only to a situation where brain damage leaves a person partially paralysed yet they are completely unaware of their deficit and will deny that anything is wrong with them but has, in popular usage, come to cover such things as what the term alexithymia, for instance, more properly refers to.

Originally the term anosognosia referred only to a situation where brain damage leaves the person partially paralysed yet they are completely unaware of their deficit and will deny that anything is wrong with them (anosognosia generally occurs with extensive damage to the right hemisphere, leaving the left half of the body extensively paralysed, whereas the same pattern of damage to the left hemisphere will result in similar paralysis to the right half of the body but there is no lost awareness of disability).

Briefly, anosognosia is a neurological disorder that causes the patient to be unable to recognize the existence of another disorder that he/she suffers from. The word comes from the Greek ‘gnosis’, meaning knowledge and ‘a-’ meaning without. So patients can be agnosic for colours (colour agnosia), agnosic for objects (object agnosia), agnosic for faces (‘prosopagnosia’ – from Greek ‘prosopon’ and agnosia) and so on.

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(2.)be tested for anosognosia:

• [Co-Respondent]: ‘I am exploring into the issue of whether one can experience anything without knowing that one is experiencing it. So for example, there may be anger, emotional pain etc, and one does not know that.
• [Richard]: ‘The medical term, for the symptoms you describe here, has popularly become known as anosognosia. However, the people observing such a person, who does have this disorder, can vouch for displays of [quote] ‘anger, emotional pain etc.’ [endquote] whilst the person in question is not personally feeling them ... needless is to say that no such displays of quote] ‘anger, emotional pain etc.’ [endquote] have been detected by anybody that has contact with me?
And I have been scrutinised closely by many, many people over the last nine years’.

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