Failing to accept being blind, people with Anton syndrome dismiss evidence of their condition and employ confabulation to fill in the missing sensory input.
Neurologist Macdonald Critchley describes it thusly: The sudden development of bilateral occipital dysfunction is likely to produce transient physical and psychological effects in which mental confusion may be prominent.
Attention is aroused however when the patient is found to collide with pieces of furniture, to fall over objects, and to experience difficulty in finding his way around.
Anosognosia occurs because visual inputs cannot be meta-cognitively compared to priors stored in memory to recognize a deficit.
Ocular movements and pupil reflexes were still intact, but the patient could not name objects and was not aware of light changes in the room, and seemed unaware of her visual deficit.
Attention is aroused, however, when the patient is found to collide with pieces of furniture, to fall over objects, and to experience difficulty in finding their way around.
Anton described the case of Juliane Hochriehser, a 69-year-old experiencing anosognosia, with cortical deafness that stemmed from lesions on both of her temporal lobes.
After this initial finding, Anton went on to describe other individuals who had similar experiences of objective blindness and deafness but denied their deficiencies.
The European Journal of Neurology published an article in 2007 that examines a case study of a six-year-old child with Anton syndrome and early stages of adrenoleukodystrophy.
In the second book of his Essais, near the final of the twelfth chapter, Montaigne describes a nobleman who experienced visual anosognosia but denied his own blindness.