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sumatra_squall 's review for:
An Anthropologist on Mars
by Oliver Sacks
Oftentimes, collections of medical cases focus mainly on the unusual features of the cases, the efforts to diagnosis and to treat these cases. For Sacks' collections of neurological cases, they are also opportunities to meditate on the nature
An Anthropologist on Mars has seven tales. The Case of the Colorblind Painter recounts the tale of Mr I, an artist who at the age of 65 loses all sense of colour. Not just his ability to see and perceive colour, but indeed had "lost all the remembrance, the inner knowledge, of it that had been part of his very being….it was as if his past, his chromatic past, had been taken away, as if the brain's knowledge of colour had been totally excised, leaving no trace, no inner evidence, of its existence behind". The Last Hippie covers the case of Greg F, whose sight and memories post-1960s was destroyed by a large benign brain tumour that had only been diagnosed and removed after the damage had been done. A Surgeon's Life recounts the tale of Dr Carl Bennett, a surgeon in Branford, British Columbia with Tourette's Syndrome. The Landscape of His Dreams is about Franco Magnani, a man with extraordinarily detailed and accurate visual memories of his Tuscan hometown, Pontito, and spends his life making paintings of Pontito. Prodigies covered individuals with autism and how their deficiencies on some fronts were matched with exceeding talents on other fronts, such as a prodigious memory, calculating power, drawing ability, as was the case with Stephen Wiltshire. What struck me most from the piece was Sacks' observation that "savants provide the strongest evidence that there can ben many different forms of intelligence, all potentially independent of each other". An Anthropologist on Mars was on Temple Grandin, a remarkable autistic person who holds a PhD in animal science, teaches at Colorado State University and runs her own business designing complex feedlot and ranch facilities.
To See and Not See was on a fifty year old man named Virgil who had been virtually blind since early childhood but had recently gained a sense of sight after an operation to remove his thick cataracts. I found this tale particularly fascinating because it helped me understand that sight isn't a function you either have or don't have, it's something you have to learn to do:
"The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine [the confusion of people blinded since childhood who have their vision restored]. For we, born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection." Babies have learn to see and make sense of what they are seeing - to know that the mass of colour and shapes is a face and to make the connection that a voice is coming from that face, for instance; to learn to understand space and distance - that things further away are smaller; to understand shadows and depth - to see steps as solid objects going p and down in three dimensional space and not just a mass of parallel and criss-crossing lines on a plane. So when babies spend time looking at caregivers' faces, looking at their own hands as they wave them about and clench and unclench them, fitting different shaped blocks into the corresponding holes, they are learning how to see. Sacks reminds us that "most of us have no sense of the immensity of this construction, for we perform it seamlessly, unconsciously, thousands of times a day, at a glance…we achieve perceptual constancy - the correlation of all the different appearances, the transforms of objects - very early, in the first months of life. It constitutes a huge learning task but is achieved so smoothly, so unconsciously, that its enormous complexity is scarecely realised (though it is an achievement that even the largest supercomputers cannot begin to match)." For people like Virgil, it is a monumental task that they have to learn late in life when their brain is much much less plastic compared to an infant's.
Overall, I found each case an interesting study but the reading experience was a little uneven. In the Case of the Colorblind Painter, Sacks included a significant chunk on the history of our knowledge on how the brain perceives colour, from Isaac Newton to experiments by Swiss opthamologist Louis Verrey, to Goethe's Farbenlehre, to name a few personalities. This might interest some people but it wasn't quite my cup of tea. Tales like A Surgeon's Life, Too See and Not See, Prodigies and An Anthropologist on Mars, which focussed more on the individuals behind the casesand their particular personal history, I found much more compelling to read.
3.5 stars overall.
An Anthropologist on Mars has seven tales. The Case of the Colorblind Painter recounts the tale of Mr I, an artist who at the age of 65 loses all sense of colour. Not just his ability to see and perceive colour, but indeed had "lost all the remembrance, the inner knowledge, of it that had been part of his very being….it was as if his past, his chromatic past, had been taken away, as if the brain's knowledge of colour had been totally excised, leaving no trace, no inner evidence, of its existence behind". The Last Hippie covers the case of Greg F, whose sight and memories post-1960s was destroyed by a large benign brain tumour that had only been diagnosed and removed after the damage had been done. A Surgeon's Life recounts the tale of Dr Carl Bennett, a surgeon in Branford, British Columbia with Tourette's Syndrome. The Landscape of His Dreams is about Franco Magnani, a man with extraordinarily detailed and accurate visual memories of his Tuscan hometown, Pontito, and spends his life making paintings of Pontito. Prodigies covered individuals with autism and how their deficiencies on some fronts were matched with exceeding talents on other fronts, such as a prodigious memory, calculating power, drawing ability, as was the case with Stephen Wiltshire. What struck me most from the piece was Sacks' observation that "savants provide the strongest evidence that there can ben many different forms of intelligence, all potentially independent of each other". An Anthropologist on Mars was on Temple Grandin, a remarkable autistic person who holds a PhD in animal science, teaches at Colorado State University and runs her own business designing complex feedlot and ranch facilities.
To See and Not See was on a fifty year old man named Virgil who had been virtually blind since early childhood but had recently gained a sense of sight after an operation to remove his thick cataracts. I found this tale particularly fascinating because it helped me understand that sight isn't a function you either have or don't have, it's something you have to learn to do:
"The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine [the confusion of people blinded since childhood who have their vision restored]. For we, born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection." Babies have learn to see and make sense of what they are seeing - to know that the mass of colour and shapes is a face and to make the connection that a voice is coming from that face, for instance; to learn to understand space and distance - that things further away are smaller; to understand shadows and depth - to see steps as solid objects going p and down in three dimensional space and not just a mass of parallel and criss-crossing lines on a plane. So when babies spend time looking at caregivers' faces, looking at their own hands as they wave them about and clench and unclench them, fitting different shaped blocks into the corresponding holes, they are learning how to see. Sacks reminds us that "most of us have no sense of the immensity of this construction, for we perform it seamlessly, unconsciously, thousands of times a day, at a glance…we achieve perceptual constancy - the correlation of all the different appearances, the transforms of objects - very early, in the first months of life. It constitutes a huge learning task but is achieved so smoothly, so unconsciously, that its enormous complexity is scarecely realised (though it is an achievement that even the largest supercomputers cannot begin to match)." For people like Virgil, it is a monumental task that they have to learn late in life when their brain is much much less plastic compared to an infant's.
Overall, I found each case an interesting study but the reading experience was a little uneven. In the Case of the Colorblind Painter, Sacks included a significant chunk on the history of our knowledge on how the brain perceives colour, from Isaac Newton to experiments by Swiss opthamologist Louis Verrey, to Goethe's Farbenlehre, to name a few personalities. This might interest some people but it wasn't quite my cup of tea. Tales like A Surgeon's Life, Too See and Not See, Prodigies and An Anthropologist on Mars, which focussed more on the individuals behind the casesand their particular personal history, I found much more compelling to read.
3.5 stars overall.