Visual form agnosia is the inability to recognize familiar objects. The problem isn't just being able to name something that you see; it's understanding the meaning of them, recognizing what they are.
Roses from my video Flower Painting in the Wild
A person with such a condition might look at a bunch of roses and say it's "a cluster of convoluted pink forms held up by vertical green attachments."
People with visual form agnosia typically have otherwise normal eyesight, intelligence, memory, attention, and language ability.
Scientists have studied patients with this condition, often caused by a brain injury. These studies have yielded insight about the localization of functions in the brain and the pathways followed by neural activity as images are decoded. Recognition of objects seems to happen in the sides of the brain, not along the top of the brain.
That led me to wonder if there's a resemblance between visual form agnosia and the particular mode an artist shifts into while doing a painting. That is, don't we have to shut off the "naming engine" or the "categorization machine" in order to really see what we're painting?
Perhaps one day scientists will study what happens in an artist's brain at various stages of the process of drawing and painting.
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