health education

Agnosia is a general term for the inability to recognize objects, people, sound, shapes, or smells, where in fact, the basic sensory modalities are intact. According to experts, people with agnosia has difficulty recognizing an object or face’s geometric features but not know what the object is used for or whether a face is familiar or not.

Agnosia is usually limited to one sensory modality such as vision or hearing. For example, a person may have difficulty in recognizing an object as a cup, or identifying a sound as a cough. Agnosia is usually the result once a specific brain area is damaged such as occipital or parietal lobes of the brain. Acquiring agnosia might possibly trigger stoke, dementia, developmental disorders, or other neurological conditions. However, people with agnosia may still retain their cognitive abilities in other areas.

Basically, there are three different types of agnosia and these are visual agnosia, auditory agnosia, and somatosensory agnosia.

Visual Agnosia is the most common. It is a neurological disorder known by the loss of ability to determine familiar objects. Visual Agnosia is associated with the injury of the left occipital and temporal lobes. In addition, there are a number of sub-types of visual agnosia. These are Prosopagnosia or the inability to identify faces, Agnostic Alexia that concerns reading capability of the patient, Color Agnosia or the inability to distinguish between colors and cannot possibly name the color, Object Agnosia or the inability to name object, and lastly, Simultanagnosia or the inability to identify a whole image though are  recognized.

Auditory Agnosia or sometimes called cortical deafness is the term used to patients who does not respond to any auditory information though the sense of hearing is not impaired. There are also sub-types for this type of Agnosia and these are Auditory/Verbal Information Agnosia or the inability to hear words, Auditory Agnosia or the inability to hear environmental sounds such as dog barking, and the Receptive Amusia or the inability to hear music.

Somatosensory Agnosia is a disorder that affects the patient’s inability to recognize the basic features of an object by touch even though the tactile stimulation is intact.

There is no direct cure to Agnosia. Patients may improve if the necessary information is presented in other modalities than the damaged one. Different types of therapies can help to reverse the effects of Agnosia. In some cases, occupational therapy or speech therapy can improve agnosia, depending on its cause.