A rare medical condition: a person who doesn't see numbers

In an extraordinary medical case, an engineering geologist mislaid his ability to discern numbers from 2 to 9 after suffering nerve damage, and a team of scientists searched his case to seek out out if the patient saw the numbers but was unable to perceive them, or did he not see them at all? Note that he's still ready to understand letters, symbols, and numbers 0 and 1.

Michael McCluskey, head of the research team - scientist at Johns Hopkins University - said: “When a patient looks at the amount, his brain should see it first before he can't distinguish and recognize what it's, and this is often extremely difficult.

In this paper, we tried to understand the knowledge processing process that occurs outside the bounds of the patient's perception and consciousness ».
Rare medical condition: a person who cannot see numbers - an engineering geologist lost his ability to perceive numbers 2 through 9 after suffering nerve damage
The patient - applied to within the study as RFS - was diagnosed with a rare degenerative brain disorder called Cortical Degenerative Basal Syndrome, caused by severe corrosion to the cortical and basal zones.
Most of these with these diseases experience symptoms like memory problems, muscle spasms, and difficulty walking, but our RFS patient, in addition to those symptoms, suffered from the loss of ability to perceive, describe, or maybe copy most ancient Arabic numerals.
In a video they posted, the researchers asked RFS to undertake to repeat an orange number 8, drawing strings of black, likening them to spaghetti against an orange background.
In another experiment, the researchers placed pictures and words next to or inside figures of huge numbers. The patient was successful in recognizing the pictures in capital letters but was unable to ascertain the pictures inside the numbers.

Rare medical condition: a person who cannot see numbers - an engineering geologist lost his ability to perceive numbers 2 through 9 after suffering nerve damage
The medical team devised a variety of possibilities to elucidate this extremely strange case, and located that the patient had rare cognitive abnormalities.

In the research paper, the team says:

Due to the lack of visual misuse that the patient suffers from RFS, we were unable to confirm that he had a real deformity.
We don't prefer this probability within the case of RFS for several reasons, the primary of which is that RFS was reexamining at the time of the study by a psychiatrist to assist him to deal with his condition, and therefore the psychiatrist didn't doubt the likelihood of a disorder behind the patient’s cognitive, cognitive or physical symptoms additionally to the answers to RFS within the test of distinguishing between two options, it had been random, in contrast to the answers of the nurses and therefore the alleged mental disturbance.

The team worked with RFS for nearly eight years and put in situ an alternate numeration system that he used on the work until he retired a couple of years later.
Rare medical condition: a person who cannot see numbers - an engineering geologist lost his ability to perceive numbers 2 through 9 after suffering nerve damage
Researchers were ready to better understand RFS after performing electrophoresis on his brain. RFS couldn't recognize the faces and pictures within the numbers, but the researchers suspect its brain was capable of that.

Harvard University scientist Theresa Schubert says: "The patient never realized the presence of a word in those pictures, albeit his brain recognized the presence of a word and was ready to identify it exactly just like the word" horn ".

In neuroscience, it's often assumed that the neural activity captured by EEGs causes visual awareness, but research also indicates that consciousness needs additional processing operations, and this is often the last stage within the visual awareness process that the RFS brain doesn't have.
David Rothlin of VA Boston Health Care explains:

 “His brain was ready to recognize the faces within the numbers, but his consciousness didn't recognize them, and these results show that the RFS brain shows complex processing progress despite the loss of consciousness.”