Your Family, Our Responsibility !
Visual agnosia is a condition that disrupts your brain’s ability to process and understand what you see with your eyes. There are several different forms of visual agnosia, with a wide range of effects on your ability to see the world around you.
The symptoms of visual agnosias depend on the form and type of agnosias.
Forms of visual agnosia
| Type | Definition |
|---|---|
| Akinetopsia | This is when you can recognize objects but can’t recognize that they’re moving. |
| Alexia | People with this condition can’t recognize words they see. That means they can see the words but can’t make sense of or read them. They can still write and speak without any problem. |
| Amusia | The visual effect of this problem causes a person to lose the ability to read music (see the auditory effect below). |
| Autopagnosia |
People with this type have trouble recognizing body parts, either their own or on another person. They might also have trouble recognizing body parts from a drawing or picture. A sub-type of this is finger agnosia, which means you know what fingers are, but can’t recognize them when you see them. |
| Achromatopsia | Also known as color agnosia, this is where a person can see colors and tell them apart, but they can’t identify the color. |
| Balint syndrome | This condition affects your ability to see the world around you. Instead of seeing the big picture and the details, including different objects and how they’re connected or related, you see only scattered objects. You also can’t connect how they relate to each other. |
| Cortical blindness | This happens when there’s damage to the parts of your brain that receive visual input. Your eyes work, but your brain can’t process the signals sent from your eyes. |
| Environmental agnosia |
This type means you can’t recognize where you are, describe a familiar location or give directions to it. Topographical agnosia is a type of environmental agnosia. People with this problem can remember the specifics of a building layout or their surroundings but can’t recognize where they are in relation to that layout. This means they can’t find their way around. |
| Form agnosia | This is where you can see the parts of an object but can’t recognize the object itself. An example of this is identifying the wheels, seat and handlebars of a bicycle when you look at each part, but you can’t recognize them as part of the whole bicycle. |
| Simultanagnosia |
Problems seeing more than one of an object. There are multiple types of this condition. Dorsal simultanagnosia: This is where a person can only see one object at a time. When they aren’t focusing on an object, they can’t see it. Ventral simultanagnosia: This is where a person can see multiple objects at a time but can only identify them individually. This is like standing in a forest but only recognizing one tree at a time and never recognizing the forest as a whole. |
| Prosopagnosia |
Known as “face-blindness,” a person with this struggles to recognize the faces of people they’ve met before or facial expressions in general. This type of agnosia has apperceptive and associative forms: Apperceptive prosopagnosia is when you can’t recognize a person’s facial expressions or other nonverbal cues. Associative prosopagnosia is when you can’t recognize a person’s face even if you’re familiar with them. You can still recognize them by other means, such as their voice or the sound of how they walk. This condition usually happens because of brain damage, but it also has a congenital form, meaning you have it when you’re born. People born with this struggle to recognize faces their whole lives. Congenital prosopagnosia may be an inherited condition, as it sometimes runs in families, but more research is necessary to confirm this. |
| Social-emotional agnosia | This is when you can’t recognize nonverbal cues (like body language). It’s similar to apperceptive prosopagnosia (see directly above). |
Visual agnosia happens because of brain damage or diseases that cause disruptions inside of your brain.
Brain damage
Damage to your brain causes injuries, known as lesions, affecting how those areas work. Some examples of conditions or problems that cause brain lesions include:
Degenerative and progressive brain diseases
These are diseases that disrupt the structure or function of your brain, including the connections between different areas. Disruptions in the structure and connections mean that different areas of your brain can’t communicate and work together as they should.
Conditions that cause or involve these kinds of disruptions include:
Visual agnosia isn’t contagious. While some infections can cause it, this is rare and having one of these infections isn’t a guarantee of developing this condition.
Visual agnosia isn’t directly curable. However, some of the underlying causes of this condition are curable. That can sometimes help these conditions improve, but brain damage often has permanent residual effects. If that’s the case, visual agnosia often doesn’t improve.
The treatments and medications likely for visual agnosia depend on the goal. Some methods aim to treat or cure the underlying condition that caused visual agnosia. The goals of other treatments and therapies are to help a person adapt to and live with visual agnosia, especially when it’s likely that the condition will be long-term or permanent.
Treatments for causes of visual agnosia
These approaches work on the underlying problem that’s causing visual agnosia. In some cases, treating or curing the underlying issue can help or fix visual agnosia. In other cases, the treatment aims to stop the underlying condition from worsening and causing more severe problems.
Possible treatments include, but aren’t limited to:
Treatments to help you adapt to visual agnosia
In cases where visual agnosia might improve over a long period or is permanent, some treatments and techniques can still help. Therapy and rehabilitation programs with specially trained staff and support are often part of the care plan for people with this condition.
These programs can help you adapt in multiple ways, such as:
Complications/side effects of the treatment
The possible complications or side effects of visual agnosia and the related treatments depend strongly on the type of visual agnosia and the treatments themselves. Your healthcare provider is the best person to answer any questions about what you might expect during treatment, recovery and ongoing care.
It's important not to self-diagnose or treat visual agnosia without seeing your healthcare professional. That’s because this condition involves changes in your brain, many of which can happen because of serious or deadly medical conditions. Many of the conditions that can cause visual agnosia also worsen over time, so it’s best to get care sooner rather than later.
Your healthcare provider is the best person to tell you what you can and should expect during your recovery. That’s because the recovery time for this ranges widely. Some people may recover over a few months to a year. Others will have this condition for the rest of their lives.
Diagnosing visual agnosia usually involves a combination of physical and neurological exams, gathering information about a person’s history, and diagnostic and imaging tests. Multiple approaches are usually necessary because the tests and exams look for different things:
The following diagnostic and imaging tests are possible with visual agnosia:
Other tests are possible if visual agnosia has a confirmed or suspected cause, such as an infection or exposure to toxins. Your healthcare provider is the best person to answer any questions you have about tests that are possible in connection with these conditions.