It’s always possible to produce insane minds that cannot fix themselves—the interesting question is how big a diff can be bridged at what price. And that’s a bit more difficult to answer.
I wonder, however, whether a sufficiently educated anosognosiac could determine that the sources informing them of their paralysis were more reliable than their firsthand observations. It seems unlikely, of course.
The answer appears to be no. There were a few articles in Scientific American: Mind about it a while back. Experiments show that the flaw causing stuff like people denying they can’t move their arms is part of their logic processing; they proved this by figuring out they could reset their thinking for a short time, at which point people were able to clearly state that they were paralyzed and they were surprised at their earlier thinking.
After a minute, the effect wore off and the patient returned to an earlier state. So the effect appears to short circuit the decision making process on a hardware level.
It’s always possible to produce insane minds that cannot fix themselves—the interesting question is how big a diff can be bridged at what price. And that’s a bit more difficult to answer.
I wonder, however, whether a sufficiently educated anosognosiac could determine that the sources informing them of their paralysis were more reliable than their firsthand observations. It seems unlikely, of course.
The answer appears to be no. There were a few articles in Scientific American: Mind about it a while back. Experiments show that the flaw causing stuff like people denying they can’t move their arms is part of their logic processing; they proved this by figuring out they could reset their thinking for a short time, at which point people were able to clearly state that they were paralyzed and they were surprised at their earlier thinking.
After a minute, the effect wore off and the patient returned to an earlier state. So the effect appears to short circuit the decision making process on a hardware level.