An Anthropologist On Mars - Oliver Sacks
What if you lost the ability to know what color is?
Not just to see in color, but to conceive in color. All your memories suddenly monochromatic. The names and associations still intact — yellow bananas, red apples — but suddenly abstract.
The fact that this is possible at all tells us something about the human mind. If we can correlate this with organic causes, we learn something about the brain as well.
Mr. Sacks is a neurologist motivated by an extraordinary curiousity about people. That is the strength of this work, which is basically in investigation into seven rare cases of — what? Neurological damage? Sometimes. Psychological trauma? Inborn personality differences? Tumours, autism, and “temporal lobe epilepsy” that causes involuntary visions are all explored in this book.
It turns out that there are a lot of different ways a person can be. Some of these strain what it means to be a person at all, to have a separate identity. It makes you think. It makes you realize things you always felt but didn’t know. Tells you a bit, in other words, not only about how a mind might be put together, but what it might be like in someone else’s mind.
Thanks to Kateri for the loan
