ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the 19th century, a German neurologist, Gabriel Anton (1899), drew attention to the growing number of reports of patients that appeared to be unaware of profound cognitive impairments:
It is a common, but rarely discussed, medical experience that focal brain lesions, and resulting disturbances of function, are perceived, acknowledged and judged very differently by different patients … There are a great number of disorders originating in the CNS, especially with focal brain pathology, which are hardly noticed by the patients, little attention is paid to them, they are continuously forgotten after suspiciously short intervals, and they have little impact on thought and affect. Frequently, these massive disturbances of thinking, speaking, perception and movements are not attended to and do not enter the consciousness of the affected person. I do not refer here to diseases in which the ability to perceive and evaluate is lost due to severe reduction or loss of psychological function as a result of severe dementia or disorders of consciousness. (pp. 86–87).
