Impaired Vision: How the Visual World May Change after Brain Damage

An unprecedented book that discusses a decades long journey of understanding vision and visual impairment through working with patients with brain damage

Edward de Haan, a noted clinical vision researcher for the last 35 years, explains how the healthy brain deals with visual information and reveals how he learned to appreciate what it means to be visually impaired. Through discussions of fascinating case studies, he shows that visual deficits are individually unique. Some patients perceive the world without color, some see objects in a distorted manner, whilst others will claim that they can still see although they are demonstrably blind.

The author details his experiences with these patients to demonstrate the manner in which patient work is a unique and vital part of discovering how the brain processes visual information. In doing so, Impaired Vision offers a review of the clinical symptoms related to visual impairment and highlights that the patient study method has not lost any of its relevance in our increasingly high-tech world. This important book: 

• Explores the various clinical phenomena in visual impairment after brain damage
• Demonstrates the effectiveness of the patient study method for understanding visual deficits after brain damage
• Contains comprehensive coverage of the variety of symptoms that are manifest in patients with visual impairment
• Includes compelling case studies of visually impaired patients

Written for a general audience but of interest for students, researchers and clinicians, Impaired Vision contains fascinating case studies that offer an understanding of the symptoms that are associated with visuals deficits of brain damage.

Edward de Haan is a distinguished neuropsychologist with both clinical and research appointments. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and has written more than 250 academic papers on vision, perception, memory, and consciousness, as well as on the impact of stroke, diabetes, and schizophrenia. He is President of the Federation for European Societies for Neuropsychology (2018-2019) and he has been an active member of the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) since the mid-1980s. He is an award-winning educator with more than 30 PhD students, many of whom are now also professors themselves.