14 DAY TRIAL // A paper recently published in the journal Neurocase details the case of a man from Brazil who has been left suffering from pathological generosity by a stroke that hit a subcortical region of his brain.
By the looks of it, it was not long after the stroke had occurred when the 49-year-old man started buying food and beverages from children he chanced to stumble upon on the street.
According to his wife, the changes in his behavior also caused the man to lose his job as a manager at a large corporation.
What is interesting is that he was fully aware of the fact that he was acting in a fairly peculiar manner. However, he settled for saying that he was merely “enjoying life,” sources tell us.
The specialists who diagnosed this patient with pathological generosity explain that, as shown by CT scans, the brain area that was affected when the 49-year-old suffered the stroke is the one in charge of controlling higher-level thinking.
Therefore, it need not come as such a big surprise that, as a result of this area's being flooded with blood, the man developed changes in his behavior and his personality was also altered.
However, they do admit that, of all the stroke-related personality and behavior changes that have been documented over the years, this one is among the oddest.
What they mean is that, rather than becoming surprisingly generous people, stroke victims often turn into hoarders and/or also display symptoms associated with sociopathy.
“Stroke can cause a whole variety of neuropsychological and behavioral changes,” Dr. Larry Goldstein of the Stroke Center at Duke University explains.
“Although the observation of personality change is not that unusual, this particular one is apparently novel,” the researcher goes on to say.
Besides developing pathological generosity, this man also found himself suffering from depression, forgetfulness and an inability to focus in the aftermath of the stroke.
Doctors were able to use drugs to treat these conditions. The man's pathological generosity, on the other hand, proved incurable.