10 Strange Brain Disorders That Mess Up Your Sense of Reality

Imagine being able to feel both the happiness and the pain of another person. Or being sure you’re dead even though everything says you’re not.

These are just some of the strange brain diseases that a small number of people have had over the years. The classic book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks taught us about some of the weirdest brain disorders, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some of the most strange mental illnesses.

1. People with Cotard’s syndrome think they are dead because of this disease

Mr. B was a 65-year-old retired teacher who didn’t have a history of mental illness in his family. All of a sudden, he started to feel sad, stopped being able to feel pleasure, slept and ate less, and started to feel like he wasn’t worth anything. Later, he started to think that his organs had stopped working and that his house was going to fall down. After he tried to kill himself, he started to think he was dead.

This man had a disease called Cotard’s syndrome, which is also called Walking corpse syndrome. People with this disease think they are dead. Surprisingly, more than half of these people also think they will live forever. Antidepressants, antipsychotics, or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can be used to treat the condition.

2. Prosopagnosia means that some people can’t remember the faces of other people

Oliver Sacks, an author and neurologist, tells the story of a man who “took his wife for a hat.” He had prosopagnosia, also called “face blindness,” which made it so he couldn’t recognize faces. (Sacks has a mild form of the condition himself.)

Depending on how bad the case is, a person may have trouble recognizing just familiar faces, differentiating between the faces of strangers, or even telling a face from an object. Some people who have prosopagnosia can’t even tell who they are looking at. Most of the time, a stroke causes the condition, but up to 2.5% of people are born with it.

3. People with mirror-touch synaesthesia can feel what other people feel when they touch them

On an episode of the NPR show Invisibilia, a woman who wanted to remain anonymous said that when she sees people being hugged, she feels like she’s getting a hug herself. When she sees someone hurt, she feels the same pain in the same place. She can’t stand to watch people eat because it makes her feel like they’re trying to shove food in her mouth.

Amanda has a rare condition called “mirror-touch synesthesia,” which lets her “feel” what other people around her are feeling. She was born with this ability, but some people get it after having a stroke or having a limb amputated (which can make a “phantom” limb feel real). The first case of this disease was reported in 2005, and since then, there have only been a few more.

4. People with Capgras delusion believe that a loved one has been replaced by a fake

A 36-year-old woman thought that her son and other family members had been replaced by fakes after she gave birth. The delusion lasted for five years, and no matter what the doctors did, it didn’t go away. The woman was finally given electroconvulsive therapy, in which electrical shocks are sent through the brain to make someone have a seizure. After that, her mental health problems went away.

The woman had what is called the Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome. This is when you think that people you care about have been replaced by fakes, robots, or aliens. It usually happens to people with paranoid schizophrenia, but it has also been seen in people with dementia or a brain injury. Also, women are more likely to have it than men (by a ratio of 3:2).

5. Alien hand syndrome: Some people think their hand doesn’t belong to them

A woman who was 82 years old had a stroke. When she got better, about six weeks later, she said that her left arm did not belong to her. She thought instead that the arm belonged to her brother, who was with her when she had the stroke. She felt like the arm wouldn’t do what she wanted it to do.

This was a case of alien hand syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which a person’s limb moves without their control, making them feel like it doesn’t belong to them. The patient may sometimes reach for things with the alien hand and have to hold it back with the healthy hand. The condition can happen when the links between the two sides of the brain are cut, but it can also happen after a stroke or other injury to the brain. About 400 cases of alien hand syndrome have been reported so far.

6. Hemispatial neglect: This is a condition that makes you not see half of the world

Some stories say that after a stroke, some people start to ignore half of their world. For example, one of these people might not eat half of the food on her plate, even though she is still hungry. Or she could only draw the numbers 12 to 6 on a clock face.

The woman had hemispatial neglect, a condition that happens when damage to one side of the brain makes a person forget about one side of the space around them. The person can’t see or understand information from that side of the body or environment anymore (often the side opposite the brain injury).

7. People with aphantasia can’t make mental pictures of things

After he had coronary angioplasty surgery, MX, who was 65 years old, suddenly lost the ability to picture things in his mind. He said on questionnaires that he couldn’t see any images, even though he did fine on standard tests of perception, visual imagery, and visual memory.

After the researchers said this, more than 20 other people got in touch with them to say they had the same problem with not being able to picture things. Even though it is not yet a known neurological disorder, scientists have given it the name “aphantasia,” which comes from the Greek word for “imagination.”

8. Some people get religious delusions when they visit the holy city of Jerusalem

In search of the one “true” religion, a healthy German man went to Jerusalem to study Judaism. But he ended up having a psychotic break in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was built on the spot where Jesus is thought to have been crucified and buried.

Researchers say that this man may have had Jerusalem syndrome, which is when people who visit the holy city get religious delusions and crazy ideas. In 2000, Israeli psychiatrists said that between 1980 and 1993, 1,200 tourists were taken to the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center in the city with “severe mental problems caused by Jerusalem.”

But some people have criticized the study because it didn’t say anything about who might get the disease or how to stop it.

9. Exploding head syndrome: People with this condition hear explosions in their heads

A 57-year-old Indian man went to the doctor because he had been woken up four times in the past two years by “flashing” sounds on the right side of his head, which he called “explosions in my head.”

This is a real medical condition called “exploding head syndrome.” People with this rare problem hear a loud bang inside their heads that sounds like a bomb going off, a gunshot, or another deafening sound. But it doesn’t hurt, make you swell up, or make you feel any other way. Experts aren’t sure what causes it, but stress and tiredness seem to be factors. We don’t know how common this disorder is, but some studies show that college students may have it a lot.

10. Foreign Accent Syndrome: Some people who have had a stroke talk with a foreign accent

A 39-year-old Irish woman had a stroke and was no longer able to speak. But as she got better, she started to talk in a way that sounded like she was from France. She had never lived anywhere but Ireland, and her first language was English.

The doctor said that the woman had foreign accent syndrome, which is a rare speech problem that is usually caused by a stroke. But it has also been said that it can be caused by trauma or mental illness, or that it can happen on its own. Between 1941 and 2009, 62 people have been diagnosed with this disorder.