Balint's Syndrome

Balint's syndrome is a rare neuropsychological disorder made up of three co-occurring visual impairments: simultanagnosia, the inability to perceive more than one object in the visual field at a time; oculomotor apraxia, difficulty voluntarily directing the eyes to fixate on a target; and optic ataxia, difficulty using vision to guide the hand toward an object. First identified in 1909 by the Austro-Hungarian neurologist Rezső Balint, it usually results from damage to both parieto-occipital regions of the brain, most often following an acute stroke, though it can also arise from degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease or from traumatic brain injury; because clinicians unfamiliar with the syndrome can mistake it for blindness, psychosis or dementia, it is frequently misdiagnosed.