Anton's Syndrome: When Blind People Insist They Can See

There are many conditions that can lead to partial or total loss of vision, but one of them results in the patient's absolute denial of their blindness. This is Anton's syndrome, which manifests as a rare symptom of brain damage occurring in the occipital lobe. Patients not only insist that they can see normally, but also share completely false details about their surroundings, to the point of inventing objects and people that are not there.

When we think of blindness, the first thing that comes to mind is some kind of deterioration in the eyes or optic nerves, but there is also the concept of cortical blindness. If the occipital region of the brain suffers some kind of injury, vision loss is complete even though the combination of eye and optic nerve remains intact.

The injury can be the result of a wound or a stroke, but blindness may not be its only consequence. This leads to the so-called Anton's syndrome, identified by neurologists Gabriel Anton and Joseph Babinski. In simple terms, the person suffering from the syndrome is completely blind, but insists that they can see normally.

Anton's syndrome and the "false vision"

Fans of the series House M.D. likely remember this syndrome from one of its episodes, but outside fiction, the strongest hypothesis for the denial of blindness indicates that damage to the visual cortex affects communication with the speech areas in the brain. All visual information is received correctly (since there is no damage to eyes and nerves), but it becomes impossible to interpret it. In an attempt to compensate or correct this conflict, the result is pure confabulation. The patient ends up in a state of anosognosia (denial of neurological pathology), and tries to move or describe their surroundings as if they could see normally.

Most cases involve adults, but the European Journal of Neurology published in 2007 a study on a six-year-old boy with Anton's syndrome and early stages of adrenoleukodystrophy, a series of disorders that prevent the breakdown of fats, with hereditary traits linked to the X chromosome. The boy had developed unusual eye movements, fell frequently, tried to grab objects and failed completely, and denied both his migraines and eye pain.

The National Library of Medicine in the United States indicates that only 28 cases of Anton's syndrome have been documented between 1965 and 2016.