Epidemic Anosognosia. Run!

It's a familiar old story. You go to your familiar old doctor and get told....but I precede myself, we want background here. So I have appended a Normaphoto of the human brain. Its resemblance to a Normaphoto of a hornet's nest in our eaves is purely coincidental. One sees one's doctor and the following exchange ensues:

Doctor: I believe you are suffering from anosognosia.

Patient: Am NOT!

I should mention here, anosognosia is a malady first named by neurologist, Joseph Babinski, in 1914. It is a disability that renders its sufferers unaware of their disability. People with anosognosia do not  know they have it, because they cannot. Therefore, the consultation above is a conclusive test for the problem and the result is always positive.

The condition has little to do with age or collateral caducity. I use myself as example. Although not a young man, I have undertaken the study of a foreign language, Canadian, and am doing well. My mind is facile. Nor do I eschew alternative medicine: I am considering chiropractic to have my eyebrows realigned. Likewise, when troubled by The Jumps, I make an appointment to get that fixed too. But if I should suffer from something that prevents me knowing I suffer it, whom do I turn to?

In the study of human folly, I have witnessed whole populations enthralled by misconception and prejudice, huge factions marginalized, human beings wasted by arbitrary discrimination, useless wars undermining economies, greed devouring government by discussion...suffice it to say, when I reflect upon global and  domestic political psychology and the strange enthusiasms it generates, I wonder if anosognosia is not epidemic. Brain has indeed run through that run-on sentence again and again.

Still, brain buzzes and builds, year after year, up there under the eaves, functional, hopeful --under construction, tattered. But Norma's scan of it has left me somewhat wary of anosognosia. Poor brain, I find little else in my experience to explain the state of its remains.