Agnosia
Agnosia is the inability to process sensory information. Often there is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain injury or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. Agnosia only affects a single modality, such as vision or hearing. More recently, a top-down interruption is considered to cause the disturbance of handling perceptual information.
Auditory agnosia
Auditory agnosia (with the exception of non-verbal auditory agnosia and amusia) is strongly dependent on damage to both hemispheres. The order of hemispheric damage is irrelevant to manifestation of symptoms, and years could take between the damage of the first hemisphere and the second hemisphere (after which the symptoms suddenly emerge). A study that compared lesion locations, reported that in all cases with bilateral hemispheric damage, at least in one side the lesion included Heschl’s gyrus or its underlying white matter. A rare insight into the etiology of this disorder was reported in a study of an auditory agnosia patient with damage to the brainstem, instead of cortex. fMRI scanning of the patient revealed weak activation of the anterior heschl's gyrus (area R) and anterior superior temporal gyrus. These brain areas are part of the auditory 'what' pathway, and are known from both human and monkey research to participate in the recognition of sounds.