Anton–Babinski syndrome is a rare symptom of brain damage occurring in the occipital lobe. People who suffer from it are "cortically blind", but affirm, often quite adamantly and in the face of clear evidence of their blindness, that they are capable of seeing. Failing to accept being blind gets dismissed by the sufferer through confabulation. It is named after Gabriel Anton and Joseph Babinski.
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Anton–Babinski syndrome is mostly seen following a stroke, but may also be seen after head injury. It is well described by the neurologist Macdonald Critchley:
The sudden development of bilateral occipital dysfunction is likely to produce transient physical and psychical effects in which mental confusion may be prominent. It may be some days before the relatives, or the nursing staff, stumble onto the fact that the patient has actually become sightless. This is not only because the patient ordinarily does not volunteer the information that he has become blind, but he furthermore misleads his entourage by behaving and talking as though he were sighted. Attention is aroused however when the patient is found to collide with pieces of furniture, to fall over objects, and to experience difficulty in finding his way around. He may try to walk through a wall or through a closed door on his way from one room to another. Suspicion is still further alerted when he begins to describe people and objects around him which, as a matter of fact, are not there at all. Thus we have the twin symptoms of anosognosia (or lack of awareness of defect) and confabulation, the latter affecting both speech and behaviour.[1]
The syndrome may be conceptualised ideally as the converse of blindsight: a syndrome in which part of the visual field is experienced as completely inoperative, but some reliable perception does in fact occur.
Why patients with Anton–Babinski syndrome deny their blindness is unknown, although there are many theories. One theory is that damage to the visual cortex results in the inability to communicate with the speech-language areas of the brain. Visual imagery is received but cannot be interpreted; the speech centers of the brain confabulate a response.[2]
Anton–Babinski syndrome was featured in two episodes of the House, M.D. TV series, titled "Euphoria, Part 1" and "Euphoria, Part 2", although it was ascribed to primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, a disease that usually does not cause the syndrome in real life.
The syndrome features prominently in the Rupert Thomson novel The Insult. It is also mentioned in the science fiction novel Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
It is mentioned frequently as "Anton's Blindness" as one of the primary metaphors in Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing.
Critchley, Macdonald, The Divine Banquet of the Brain, Raven, New York, 1979