Science News – After a stroke, a 25 year old Englishman now has an odd symptom: he can no longer feel disgust. The specific areas in his brain that were damaged are the ones that process feelings of disgust when looking at certain images, such as an overflowing toilet or a smelly dead body.
When a scientific group led by neuroscientist Andrew J. Calder, of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England, showed the patient pictures of faces showing various emotions, such as anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, the one expression he could not identify was that of disgust. He also could not identify retching sounds, although he did recognize other sounds, such as laughter. They have determined that the man understands the concept of disgust, he can just no longer experience it.
Source: Science News.
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