Wow, Dr. Ramachandran looks a lot different than I imagined him.... Anyways, in his famous book, Phantoms of the Brain, he did this really cool experiment based on the mirror agnosia diagnosis. He called it the "Looking Glass Experiment", named after Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, sequel of Alice In Wonderland. He made small notes about many great artists and writers who had obsessions with glasses, which could be a result of affections of the right parietal lobe. I guess that saying of Genius is close to Madness might be true. So, the experiment went like this; he holds a mirror in front of a patient who's right or left visual field suffered damages. Then, he has a helper hold something behind the person, but is visible in the mirror to the viewer aka the patient. He did it with a pen and the neglect patients could not understand that the object they saw in the mirror was behind them. Instead, the patients tried to attack the mirror, looked to their left and right, said that the object was inside the mirror, and etc.
It was extremely weird, but Ramachandran hypothesized that the reason why the patients behaved as they did because of damages to the parietal lobe of the brain. It could affect spatial ability. It was super interesting. I wonder if they use this test at the hospitals now.
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