Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

by Allan H. Ropper

Symptoms are what a patient reports. Signs are what a physician sees in an examination. Symptoms are thus subjective, and signs objective. When a patient reports a symptom, we have to take it at face value: a headache, dizziness, numbness, lower back pain. We have no tests for such things, and accept them as real until something in the patient’s behavior gives the game away. The claim of blindness, on the other hand, can be tested. People follow the image of their own eyes in a mirror. Not only that, even if they don’t flinch when I bring my hand toward their face quickly, most will involuntarily glance at a $100 bill that I wave in front of them. An old-school neurologist tested this effect. What denomination will get a blind hysteric to follow the bill? A $1 bill doesn’t work; a $100 bill works almost all of the time. So he always carried a C-note in his wallet just for that purpose.