Bizarre but true stories of remarkable ways your brain can go wrong.
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By all accounts, Charles Joseph Whitman was, for much of his short life, a model citizen. He was a polite, intelligent youth; he was an Eagle Scout; he married his childhood sweetheart at age 17; he joined the Marine Corps and became a sharpshooter. Then, after leaving the service, he became an architectural engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin.
But then, on the night of 31 July 1966, he stabbed his wife and his mother to death; and, the next day, packed a bag full of guns and climbed the main tower building of the university. On his way up the tower he killed three people. Once at the top, he used a high-powered rifle to kill another 10 people, and wound 33. One of the injured was a heavily pregnant young woman, shot through the stomach, killing the unborn child. Whitman then shot her fiancé dead as she lay wounded. Eventually police managed to reach him and kill him.
You've probably heard plenty of stories like this, and Whitman does fit the profile of a spree killer: a young, white, male gun-owner. But what distinguished him was that, the night he murdered his wife and mother, he wrote a note. That note said:
I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.
It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationaly [sic] pinpoint any specific reason for doing this.
Whitman requested that his body be subjected to a post-mortem examination, because he had been suffering for months with terrible headaches and strange violent urges, and he thought something had changed in his brain:
I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt come [sic] overwhelming violent impulses. After one visit, I never saw the Doctor again, and since then have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.
He seems to have been right. As David Eagleman recounts in his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, the post-mortem was carried out, and a tumour the size of a 10p coin was found in his brain. The tumour was in a part of the brain called the thalamus, and pressed against another part, the amygdala, which is involved in regulating our fear and anger responses. We will never know for sure what caused him to snap, but the rational, thinking part of Whitman's mind appears to have been overwhelmed by a little lump of tissue which pushed him to kill.
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Humans are incredibly good at seeing faces. So good, in fact, that we seem them almost everywhere. We see Jesus in burnt toast and smiley faces in punctuation. :-) Faces leap out at us, and we struggle to look away. Eye-tracking studies show that even newborn babies will choose to look at faces and facelike things over other patterns. Our brains don't see faces like they see the rest of the world. We have what appears to be a dedicated mechanism for spotting, recognising, and remembering individual faces.
But sometimes, when a part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, towards the bottom of your skull, is damaged – in a stroke, for example – it removes this mechanism. People become almost completely incapable of telling one face from another. It is far worse than the normal "I'm terrible at remembering faces", and can have serious social consequences. One sufferer, in an interview with New Scientist, said she mistook other men for her partner, or walked past men she'd been on dates with the previous night. And, she said, she often doesn't recognise the woman she sees in the mirror. Another sufferer said that watching films is a joyless chore for him, because he spends the whole time trying to work out which character is which. "I had assumed Ocean's 11 was designed to be a movie where you're not supposed to be able to keep track of the characters," he wrote.
Sufferers tend to create workarounds – so they will recognise people from their gait, or from their clothes or hair, or the context they meet them in. When those things change it can be thoroughly confusing.
About 2.5% of people are believed to suffer from prosopagnosia, but many are unaware of it, because they have never experienced any other way of life: Oliver Sacks, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is one sufferer. If you think you may suffer from it, you can take a test on the Faceblind prosopagnosia research centre website.
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