The Art of Allowing Change: Neurobiologist Susan R. Barry’s Moving Correspondence with Oliver Sacks about the Blessed Overwhelm of Transformation

There is a thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, brilliant and haunting, about the abyss between felt experience and our mental models of it, about the nature of knowledge, the mystery of consciousness, and the irreducibility of aliveness: Living in a black-and-white chamber, Mary the scientist studies how nature works — from the physics of light to the biology of the eye — but when she exits her monochrome room and encounters color, she experiences something far beyond her knowledge of what ...