Disorders · Grey Matter

Every disorder in Grey Matter, filterable by its attributes.

- Anterograde amnesia: Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new lasting memories of events and facts after a brain injury, while what was learned before the injury, the capacity to hold something in mind for a few seconds and the ability to learn new skills largely remain. - Bitemporal hemianopia: Bitemporal hemianopia is the loss of the outer half of the visual field in both eyes, the typical sign of something pressing on the middle of the optic chiasm, most often a tumour of the pituitary gland growing upward. - Broca's aphasia: Broca's aphasia is a disorder of language production after damage to the left frontal lobe, in which speech becomes slow, effortful and stripped of grammar while the understanding of everyday conversation is relatively preserved. - Cerebellar ataxia: Cerebellar ataxia is the loss of coordination that follows damage to the cerebellum: strength is normal, but movements become poorly aimed, poorly timed and unsteady, because the system that predicts and corrects them no longer works. - Cortical blindness: Cortical blindness is the loss of sight caused by damage to the primary visual cortex of both occipital lobes, with eyes, optic nerves and pupillary reflexes that still work normally. - Epilepsy: Epilepsy is a lasting tendency of the brain to produce epileptic seizures, which are brief episodes of abnormal, excessive or synchronous neuronal activity whose signs depend on where in the brain they start and how far they spread. - Hemispatial neglect: Hemispatial neglect is a failure to notice, attend to or act on one side of space, almost always the left after damage to the right hemisphere, although the eyes and the sense of touch on that side still work. - Homonymous hemianopia: Homonymous hemianopia is the loss of the same half of the visual field in both eyes (the left half or the right half of everything seen) caused by damage behind the optic chiasm on the opposite side. - Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy: Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy is a common generalised epilepsy that starts in adolescence, recognised by sudden muscle jerks shortly after waking, and it is the clearest example of an epilepsy whose seizures follow sleep, light and fatigue. - Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy: Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy is epilepsy whose seizures start in the inner face of the temporal lobe (the hippocampus, the amygdala and the cortex around them), and it is the most common focal epilepsy in adults and the one most often treated with surgery. - Migraine: Migraine is a common brain disorder of recurring attacks of headache, usually throbbing and one-sided and made worse by light, sound and movement, that last from hours to a few days; in about a third of people who have it, some attacks begin with an aura. - Occipital epilepsy: Occipital epilepsy is epilepsy whose seizures start in the occipital lobe, and because that lobe builds vision, its seizures are seen before they are felt: lights, colours and shapes, or a patch of blindness, that the person knows are not really there. - Reflex epilepsy: Reflex epilepsy is epilepsy in which seizures are reliably set off by a specific stimulus or activity, and it is the rare case where a seizure can be provoked on demand, which makes it both a clinical problem and a window on how a network tips over. - Status epilepticus: Status epilepticus is a seizure that does not stop by itself, or seizures that follow one another without recovery in between, and it is the emergency of epilepsy: the longer it lasts, the harder it is to stop and the more likely it is to leave damage. - Urbach-Wiethe disease: Urbach-Wiethe disease (lipoid proteinosis) is a rare inherited disorder of the skin and mucous membranes that, in some patients, calcifies both amygdalae and so provides the clearest human evidence of what the amygdala does for fear. - Wernicke's aphasia: Wernicke's aphasia is a disorder of language comprehension after damage to the back of the left superior temporal gyrus, in which speech stays fluent and well articulated but loses its sense, and understanding of what others say breaks down.