The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

The first clinical tale that I chose was Reminiscence. In this tale Mrs. O'C constantly hears songs from her childhood in Ireland. Twenty-four/seven the songs are playing until one day they just stop. It first starts one night after she dreams about her home in Ireland. She wakes up, wondering who could be blasting a radio at such a late hour, but soon realizes it is all in her head. Due to and EEG the doctors find out that the songs are coming from her temporal lobe. This makes them think that the songs are merely hallucinations that will go away as a small thrombosis in part of her right temporal lobe goes away also. In time, the infarction resolves itself and the songs stop along with it. I believe that if it was not in her temporal lobe than it would have most likely been in her auditory cortex. There could have been something going wrong that caused the cortex to think that it was hearing something that actually wasn't there at all.

The second clinical tale that intrigued me was Murder. In Murder a man named Donald kills his girlfriend under the influence of PCP. To make matters worse, after it happens Donald has absolutely no memory of him committing the crime. The evidence though is overwhelming, so Donald is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. I believe that something had to be wrong with his hippocampus. The hippocampus is in the temporal lobe of the brain and is responsible for a persons memory. With it being damaged, whether by the PCP or by something that happened that night that he cannot remember, Donald would have very little memory or the event.