A Man Who Can’t See Numbers
Written By: Pimtawan Jatupornpakdee
June 24, 2020
Numbers are important factors in our daily life. It would be troublesome if we cannot distinguish those numbers. A man referring to himself by the initials RFS was diagnosed with a rare degenerative brain condition. This brain condition prevents him from seeing and recognizing numbers. When numbers are shown to him, he would see it as a scramble of meaningless curves except for the numbers “0” and “1”. David Rothlein, a postdoctoral researcher and cognitive scientist at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, wrote a report about this case and described it as the strangest thing he’s ever seen.
In 2010, RFS developed a sudden headache, trouble with speech, amnesia, and a temporary loss of vision. Later, his motor symptoms started to worsen as the years went on. It began with trouble with walking, involuntary muscle spasms and a tremor. He was diagnosed with corticobasal syndrome. This syndrome leads to problems in movement and language. Aside from that, his brain scans revealed damage and volume loss in the cerebrum, midbrain and cerebellar regions of the brain. Then, his problem with seeing numbers arose.
In 2011, Michael McCloskey, a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University, began studying RFS when he was 60 years old. The researchers have never met with anyone with the same problem as RFS. "He sees something … a scramble of lines and he calls it spaghetti," McCloskey said. RFS knew what he saw were numbers, but he didn't know which number it was. He recognized it as a number because it was the only thing he saw as a series of nonsensical lines. In addition, he cannot memorize the series of nonsensical lines because they alternate every time he looks at it. The most striking part was how this problem only affected numbers and not other symbols. For example, the alphabet letter B is similar to the number 8, but RFS can recognize the letter, as well as the other characters, without a problem. Another surprising thing is how RFS recognizes the numbers “0” and “1”. McCloskey theorized that it is because the numbers look similar to “O” and “lowercase I.”
Researchers conducted a number of experiments to study this brain condition. In the first experiment, they embedded numbers into an image of a face to test if RFS would see the face normally or as scrambled lines. They also scanned him with an electroencephalography (EEG) to measure his brain activity. The result from the experiment was that RFS didn’t see the face. In fact, he thought all he saw was digits. According to the EEG scan, his brain activity had the same response as when he saw a normal face without the embedded numbers. The same event occurs when the researchers had RFS press a button every time he saw a particular word. When the words were embedded with numbers, RFS did not recognize the words, but his brain activity didn’t change although there were digits in the words. This led the researchers to conclude that RFS’ brain knows that he was viewing the word, but the knowledge was never conscious.
McCloskey said that he believes RFS’ brain is just like others’, but the disease damages the part of his brain that is related to awareness. Researchers are still unable to pinpoint where exactly the problem is for RFS’ condition in the brain. They studied RFS’ condition for several years until his physical illness made it difficult to continue. Although his condition worsened physically, his mental condition remained the same except for the fact that he couldn't see the digits. To fix the problem, the researchers created a new set of numbers especially for RFS, so he could work with it. RFS still works as an engineer after the problem arose. In fact, McCloskey said that RFS is capable at number processing and is quite good at math.
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