bed”—describes a patient who was in the hospital after apparently
suffering a stroke and who ended up on the floor next to his hos-
pital bed. Oliver Sacks talked with the patient and found that he
was experiencing the left leg of his body as not belonging to him,
as some sort of mysterious alien leg in his bed. So he grabbed the
leg and tried to get rid of it by throwing it out of the bed. Of course,
the leg was attached to him, so in attempting to throw the leg from
his bed, he himself ended up on the floor. In addition, the left side
of his body was at least partially paralyzed, so he couldn't climb
back into bed. Finally, besides the weird leg in his bed, he was not
at all certain why he was in the hospital, because he believed there
was nothing seriously wrong with him. Left-side paralysis, experi-
encing the left side of his body as not even belonging to him (that
certainly qualifies as somatosensory weirdness), and denial that
there was anything wrong with him at all—the diagnosis would be
right frontal-parietal lesion with accompanying anosognosia.In addition to denying there is anything wrong, patients with
anosognosia will sometimes make up all kinds of stories and excuses
as to why they are unable to move parts of their body. You can ask
them why can’t they move their left arm in response to your request,
and they might say that they are tired, that people have been asking
them all day to move this and move that, and now they just want to
rest. Or they might say that their left arm has arthritis and it hurts
to move it, so they would rather not right now. “Maybe you can come
back tomorrow, okay?” You might pick up their limp paralyzed arm
and say here is your arm, why can’t you move it? And they might
reply: “That’s not my arm. I don’t know whose arm it is. I don’t know
what it’s doing here.” And so forth—the reality experienced by a pa-