Stereognosis is the ability to identify objects through touch, and is present in healthy people but can be affected in those with brain injuries. The term comes from Greek words meaning “solid knowledge”. A stereognosis test may be done on patients with brain damage to test their ability to identify common objects.
Stereognosis is a medical term for the ability to identify objects through touch. When a person handles a material, it sends tactile signals to the brain and the brain identifies the object. This ability is present in healthy people but can be affected in people who have brain injuries.
The arcane scientific term for tactile identification, stereognosis, comes from Greek words. Stereo, for example, means solid in Greek. Gnosis is another Greek word and means knowledge. The whole word, therefore, means that the solid is known to the person. If the person is unable to identify solids correctly, then he suffers from stereognosis or lack of knowledge of the solid.
A human being perceives the world through his senses. Sight is an important sense, and typically, when trying to identify an object, people use sight. Smell can be somewhat helpful when identifying scented objects such as strawberries or perfume, and hearing only applies to objects that make an audible noise. Tasting objects is useful for distinguishing the ingredients of the meal but is not suitable for many other objects.
Touch is a sense that everyone uses all day, every day, most of the time without even realizing it. Identification through touch emerges when a stone is present in a shoe, a work surface is covered in crumbs or when, in the darkness of a cinema hall, a spectator wants to fish a gummy candy out of the box. Stereognosis is this ability to detect objects when the other senses are not involved.
Healthy people usually have no problem identifying most objects that they encounter in their hands. This is because the tactile receptors in their hands receive the information about the texture, temperature, shape and size of the object and send the information to the brain to be correctly interpreted. The brain uses information cues and previous experience of similar objects to figure out what the object is.
When the brain is damaged, hand signals can be misinterpreted. The person affected by a lesion in the affected areas of the brain, such as the sensory cortex of the parietal lobe, cannot correctly recognize the object in his or her hand. For this reason, a stereognosis test is sometimes done on patients who may have suffered brain damage in that area.
Neurological exams of this type simply test the patient’s ability to identify most of the common objects placed in his or her hand. Pens, paper clips or coins are quite common to use for this test. A patient who fails to identify common objects suffers from astereognosis, which indicates the presence of a brain lesion.
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