5 Frightening Ways Your Brain Can Straight-Up Break
Damage or illness in most parts of the body can be crippling, but usually in a fairly straightforward way. If you chop off a finger or damage your lungs, the consequences are predictable. When injury or illness affects the brain, though, you're entering an entirely different (and terrifying) realm of effects. A problem with that little pink hunk inside your head can, thanks to its complexity, present in a manner that's pulled straight out of a horror story.
Here are five ways your brain can stop working in very spooky ways…
Anton Syndrome
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Blindness is obviously a difficult affliction to live with. Maybe that’s why, in incredibly rare cases, a blind person’s brain can completely refuse to accept that fact. This is called Anton Syndrome, and it goes far beyond run-of-the-mill denial. Sufferers fully believe that they can see, even though the things they claim to see are completely made-up. For example, when asked for the color or pattern of a doctor’s tie, they don’t try to deflect from the question, but immediately and confidently give an incorrect answer that they believe to be what they’re seeing.
Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome
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Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome takes its name from the book, specifically an early segment in which Alice and the items around her are constantly changing size. It’s an illness that affects the sufferer’s perception, causing them to incorrectly experience the things around them across multiple senses. They may see objects or parts of their own body as much smaller than they are, much bigger than they are or simply distorted in shape.
As if that wasn’t unsettling enough, it can also change their perception of time itself, feeling that it’s passing incredibly quickly or slowly.
Body Integrity Identity Disorder
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One of the most dangerous things about these sort of mental disorders is when they lead to the affected person engaging in bodily harm in order to “fix” what they perceive to be the problem. In the case of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, their delusion drives them to seek a pretty drastic “correction” in the form of amputation. The afflicted have a deep belief that some part of their body doesn’t belong, and its presence is, ironically, keeping them from being “complete.”
Adding to the disquieting nature of the disease is that those who do go through with amputating the offending limb have no regrets and report feeling better afterwards.
Capgras Syndrome
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If a friend or loved one develops Capgras syndrome, you’d have a particularly hard time helping them through it. That’s because Capgras syndrome causes the person in question to become convinced that loved ones and friends have been replaced with identical impostors. Researchers think that it may spring from a miscommunication or disconnect between the part of the brain handling facial recognition and the part of the brain providing emotional response to those recognition, making people seem familiar visually, but not emotionally.
Cotard’s Delusion
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If Capgras syndrome sends you for a loop, Cotard’s delusion is likely to make you terrified of the human brain altogether. It’s theorized that Cotard’s delusion can spring from a similar problem as Capgras syndrome, removing emotional recognition from a familiar face and making it seem like an impostor. The big difference being that, in this case, that familiar face is your own.
As you obviously can’t be an impostor, Cotard’s delusion leads to a different conclusion: that you’re already dead. It's so convincing to the afflicted that they can stop eating entirely and die of starvation, since they don’t believe their “dead” body has any need for nutrition.
