Imagine that on any day you wake up in the morning, open the fridge, drink the milk to drink with coffee and pour it into the cup, when you pour the desired amount stops serving, so far everything is normal. Now imagine another situation: you start pouring milk, but nothing falls, you keep filling the glass, but you still don’t see the milk fall, suddenly the glass overflows and the milk spreads everywhere, how is it possible?What happened? Welcome to aetopsia.
Aesetopsia is the inability to perceive moving objects, it is a visual agnosia, as described by Arnedo, Bembibre and Trivio (2012), visual agnosia is an alteration of the visual recognition of objects (or specific characteristics of stimulus, such as color and movement). ), with the preservation of other visual skills, such as accuracy, tracking or differentiation between lower figure and other higher functions ?.
- People with ainetopsia see the world in pictures.
- So they have great difficulty performing activities as simple as crossing a street.
- When they see the world in pictures they can’t see a moving car.
- They see you here and there; this means that.
- At best.
- They can feel the transition (speed).
- Therefore.
- Without perception of movement and not knowing where a car is at any given time.
- They can be easily crushed.
In the example of glass, the trick is to insert a finger into the rim and thus perceive to the touch when the glass is full, but in other tasks the solution is not so simple. prohibited activity for people with acinetasy, it is also necessary to mention that, if we know a person with this type of agnosia, it is advisable not to throw anything to make it fly, since the object is more likely to hit their body. face or body.
People with ainetopsia don’t have the ability to merge images seamlessly.
This is the most common type of acinetopsia. The movement is perceived as a continuous display of photographs (updated very frequently, allowing a reconstruction of the movement with great precision). In the example of the cup, instead of seeing it empty and full, you would see how it fills through static. Therefore, this type of acinetopsia is not so disabling, although it is uncomfortable.
This is the type of acinetopsia of lower incidence, but of greater severity. The blindness of the movements is total. Patients with this disease move from the image view of a remote car to that of nearby ones, losing information about movement between images, so they cannot predict the movement of an object on the outside. They may even witness “strange apparitions. “
Let’s say that someone with macroscopic aencisia is in your living room and someone sneaks in, it’s quite possible that the person with this condition will suddenly find someone in front of them, so their life is very limited.
Visual information flows forward (feedforward), i. e. from the retina to the thalamus and from there to the occipital cortex), as it moves away from the receptor, this information becomes more complex in terms of calculation, however this information is also treated backwards (feedback).
This delayed process, as Javier Cudeiro (2008) of the University of La Coruña points out, “is established through the return connections by which a given area can influence (or modulate) the activity of previous areas of the visual system”.
“Our sense of vision is like a video camera: it captures a lot of images that, reproduced at a continuous speed, generate a sense of continuity and movement. In patients with acinétopsia this sensation does not exist and they see the images separately.
Cudeiro states that it is a discovery of great importance and highlights as an example the medial temporal cortex, an area that seems to be the key to the perception of movement and its direction, so lesions of the medial temporal cortex and electrical microstimulation allowed the appearance of severe deficits such as acinetopsia.
Alvarez and Masjuan (2015) claim that “aentopia occurs after bilateral occipitoparietal lesions (there are cases of unilateral injuries reported), usually of ischemic or traumatic cause”.
Without a doubt, we are talking about an agnosia in the research phase: we still have a lot of data to know, yet every progress is very relevant because of the valuable contribution it can make to improve the quality of life of patients.
Alvarez and Masjuan point out that “these patients feel objects jumping rather than having a continuous and fluid movement, appearing and disappearing in different positions. “What should it be like to spend a day in the skin of a person with this agnosia?
The authors also point out that perceiving its surroundings in this way poses great difficulties in knowing whether an object is moving away or approaching, so how do you know if a car is near or far?How do I move in a world in constant motion?Movement?