Malcolm Myatt, a 68-year-old British man, is unable to feel sadness after a stroke left his frontal lobe damaged, The Inquistr reported.
Myatt was in the hospital for 19 weeks following his stroke in 2004. In addition to suffering brain injury, he also lost feeling in the left side of his body.
"I am never depressed. Being sad wouldn't help anything anyway. I would definitely rather be happy all the time than the other way round. It's an advantage really," he told The Telegraph.
According to medical experts, it is common for stroke victims to experience psychological, emotional, and behavioral changes.
Paresh Malhotra, neurologist and consultant at Charing Cross Hospital, explained that brain injuries can result in several types of changes.
"They can become less responsive to emotional news, whether happy or sad, and that can result from frontal lobe damage. They can also become apathetic and lose their ability to empathise. Physical damage to the brain can affect emotional responses, it can happen with a stroke, but also with other types of brain injury," Malhotra said.
Dr. Claire Walton added that she and her colleagues had never come across a patient that lost their entire ability to feel a certain type of emotion.
"While we haven't heard before of stroke survivors completely losing the ability to feel a particular emotion, many stroke survivors find it very difficult to control their emotions following a stroke and may cry or laugh at inappropriate times," Walton said.
Myatt has joined the Alzheimer Society's Memory Walk to raise money for the charity, which helped him after he suffered from the stroke.
His wife, Kath Myatt, noted that her husband's presence in any room is "infectious."
"When he starts laughing everyone in the room does. If he's in hysterics, everyone else is too. He livens up any room. Everyone misses him when he's not there," she claimed.
