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How do you know your mother is really your mother? It's simple, right? You look at her, you recognize her, enough said. Well, in this podcast...it may not be that simple.
Duration
10m
Broadcast on
08 Mar 2010
Audio Format
other

How do you know your mother is really your mother? It's simple, right? You look at her, you recognize her, enough said. Well, in this podcast...it may not be that simple.


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with Carol Berman. So my patient, who was this 37-year-old patient, comes back to her house and sits next to this man who's wearing a red plaid shirt, trucking boots. And this woman looks at this man, doesn't quite know what to make of him. I think the gene she recognized and the boots, and she takes a look at him and says, "Who are you?" And he says to her, "Well, who are you? Come over here and give me a kiss." So she leans in, little tentatively, gives him a kiss. But it feels wrong. Everything about the situation feels wrong. She was thinking this was some strange man who's sitting here in her husband's clothing. This did not look like her husband to her, and she was wondering what he was doing in her apartment. Okay, so that is one story, and now we want you to hear a second story. This one comes from Dr. VS Ramachandran.
I saw a patient not long ago, was in coma two weeks, came out of the coma, a student on our campus, intelligent, quite articulate, little bit slowed down, but overall quite intact. But here's the problem. When he looks at his mother, he says, "Doctor, who is this woman? This woman looks exactly like my mother, but she's an imposter." An imposter? She is an imposter. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother. Now, is this person coming into his actual mother? He is his mother. And of course, this is very alarming to the parents. Sometimes it still spills over to the father. Okay, it's usually somebody very close to you. And he has nothing else wrong with him. He just doesn't think that his mother is really his mother. This person looked like her husband, but there was something off. Like what? There was something about him, some essence. Like the feeling you have towards someone when you see them? Right, the feeling or the essence of the person, the soul of the person, isn't in there.
So it turns out that these two people are suffering from the same delusion.

Transcription truncated.

How do you know your mother is really your mother? It's simple, right? You look at her, you recognize her, enough said. Well, in this podcast...it may not be that simple.