No one knows how the human brain is able to unify our perceptions of sight and sound. To sync them up, scientists played clips of people whose voice sounded 210 milliseconds before their lips moved. But for PH, there’s now a quarter-second delay between hearing a voice and seeing someone’s mouth move. For most of us, our brains do the work when syncing voices with lip movement. Scientists believe our brains process sight and sound at different rates to compensate for the different speeds at which light and sound travel. Both of these parts are associated with hearing, movement, and timing. Brain scans revealed one lesion in his midbrain and another in his brain stem. He even hears his own voice before he feels his mouth move. For PH, life is like watching a movie with the sound and picture out of sync. “PH”-a retired pilot in his sixties-was the first confirmed patient with sensory desynchronization, where a person hears voices before people speak. Men with OS have tried to strangle their wives or start fights with neighborhood men suspected of being their wives’ lovers. He lost thousands of dollars to sudden gambling impulses and couldn’t control his spending habit, either.Īlso like Othello, OS patients can become dangerously violent. Accusing her of infidelity, he obsessively stared at his driveway because he was convinced that a fictional lover was going to pick her up and have sex with her somewhere else. One 42-year-old man, who was being treated with dopamine agonists for Parkinson’s, began to insist on having frequent sex with his wife. LBD includes Parkinson’s disease and dementia caused by protein deposits-called Lewy bodies-in the nerve cells of your brain. In Lewy body dementia (LBD), the symptoms of OS may continue (or even start) after the death of a spouse. If that’s the cause, then reducing or stopping the medication may alleviate the symptoms of OS. Sometimes, OS is brought on by the use of dopamine therapy for Parkinson’s disease. OS usually begins around age 68, with about 77 percent of patients having a neurological disease affecting one of the brain’s frontal lobes-usually the right one. Some patients even have hallucinations of their spouse having sex with someone else. OS patients develop the same stubborn delusions of suspicion and jealousy toward their spouses and constantly accuse them of infidelity. Othello syndrome (OS) is named after the Shakespearean character Othello, who killed his wife, Desdemona, because he believed that she was having an affair. Najjar to investigate other presumed psychiatric illnesses-such as bipolar disease, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia-to see if they, too, are actually physical illnesses caused by inflammation of the brain. A relapse requires more treatment.Īnti-NMDA has spurred Dr. Anti-NMDA can be treated with immunotherapy, but there’s no cure-only remission. Even with treatment, approximately 7 percent of patients die, and others are left with mild to severe brain damage. Susannah was treated just in time to save her from a coma and death.Īlthough Susannah recovered with no brain damage, not everyone is so lucky. Najjar knew she had inflammation on the right side of her brain. When she drew all the numbers on one side, Dr. Najjar entered the scene and asked her to draw a clock face. She thought newscasters were discussing her on TV. She had seizures and hallucinations-grunting like an animal, she would kick and punch people. One 24-year-old woman, Susannah Cahalan, spent over $1 million in hospital care with top doctors, but they repeatedly misdiagnosed her condition. “There could be people in comas right now, or people stuck in psych wards, that have this disease and aren’t being treated properly,” said Emily Gavigan-an anti-NMDA patient-to CBS Eyewitness News. Souhel Najjar, an anti-NMDA expert, believes that as many as 90 percent of these cases have been misdiagnosed. Patients appear to be possessed by demons, and most of them will develop seizures and involuntary movements within a few days.īut the neurological symptoms may be subtle and easy to miss. 10Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitisįor many patients, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis-a recently discovered autoimmune disease that causes the brain to swell-initially presents psychiatric symptoms such as hallucinations, violent outbursts, and delusions. It turns out that some brain disorders have such bizarre symptoms that they’re sometimes mistaken for psychiatric conditions. In Western countries, there’s been an explosion in neurological diseases-including early-onset dementia-that can’t be explained by longer life spans.
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