Is there something like prosopagnosia (face blindness) for things that are not faces?
Prosopagnosia ("face blindness") is a brain disorder which hinders facial recognition, the memory of people's names and other social details, and difficulty with "map memory" -- knowing how to get from one place to another, how to find Smith Street, etc.
Are there any brain disorders which leave these functions undamaged but which affect logic, word memory, etc, in a person who might otherwise be considered "normal"?
Basically, I'm looking for disorders which, like classical prosopagnosia, are due to some specific damage or defect to a localized area of the brain, and which produce an observable problem of some sort, but still leave the person largely functional, as prosopagnosia does. As a kind of over-simplistic example, it's my understanding that damage to a localized area of the cerebellum may (depending on where the damage is) produce a localized paralysis. But I'm thinking of syndromes which would be more likely to be due to something like encephalitis, or an inherited disorder, vs simple mechanical injury, and the injury would produce cognitive rather than motor symptoms.
For instance, a specific brain defect that blocks the ability to do math, or one that prevents the correlation of cause and effect.
(I realize this question is kind of vague, but I'm not a neuroscience pro and don't know what terminology to use.)
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Agnosia refers to difficulty processing some type of sensory information. Prosopagnosia is just the particular one related to faces, there are many other agnosias caused mainly by brain injury to some specific part of neocortex. There are also aphasias which are difficulties specifically related to speech, or apraxia which is a specific deficit with regards to motor planning.
All of these conditions can be fairly specific (i.e., other functions are spared/normal), although because they are associated with brain injury they can also come together with more general cognitive or sensory deficits, because very specific lesions are not that common in a real world setting.
Note also that the term "prosopagnosia" is only related to the difficulty with faces; "map memory" difficulties are not related to prosopagnosia directly, but it is not unusual that someone has injury or damage to more than one brain region.
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