An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has.

“Adaptation follows a different path in each person. The nervous system creates its own paths. You’re the neurologist—you must see this all the time.”

vicissitudes

Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its “creative” potential,

transforms the minus of the handicap into the plus of compensation.

Foucault

Color is not a trivial subject

Spinoza

something deeper and difficult to define. He knew all about color, externally, intellectually, but he had lost the remembrance, the inner knowledge, of it that had been part of his very being.

visual modes that still remained to him—form, contour, movement, depth—and exploring them with heightened intensity.

These demonstrations, overwhelming in their simplicity and impact, were color “illusions” in Goethe’s sense, but illusions that demonstrated a neurological truth—that colors are not “out there” in the world, nor (as classical theory held) an automatic correlate of wavelength, but, rather, are constructed by the brain.

Piet Mondrian, and Land therefore terms them “color Mondrians.”

damage sustained was metabolic only, not structural;

beauty of the natural world, and the world of people, and of the innumerable objects whose colors are part of daily life, but he had also lost the world of art,

emotion and aesthetic appeal in relation to color, and indeed in relation to seeing generally—and this is a matter

Indeed, he now spoke of being “divorced” from color. He could still speak fluently about it, but there seemed to be a certain hollowness to his words, as if he were drawing only from past knowledge and no longer understood it.

“Gradually I am becoming a night person. It’s a different world: there’s a lot of space—you’re not hemmed in by streets, by people.… It’s a whole new world.”

We know, for instance, that the constant use of one finger in reading Braille leads to a huge hypertrophy of that finger’s representation in the cortex.

“On the Colour Sense of Homer,” spoke of Homer’s use of such phrases as “the wine-dark sea.” Was this just a poetic convention, or did Homer, the Greeks, actually see the sea differently?

(All of these things may also be clearer to color normals at twilight.)

bellicose

Timothy Leary was urging American youth to “tune in, turn on, and drop

But “turning on” did not satisfy Greg, who stood in need of a more codified doctrine and way of life.

The only radical remedy for dipsomania,” William James once said, “is religiomania.”)

One problem arose in Greg’s second year with the Krishnas—he complained that his vision was growing dim, but this was interpreted, by his swami and others, in a spiritual way: he was “an illuminate,” they told him; it was the “inner light” growing.

Unaware—and indifferent.

“I feel blissful,”

They would come to visit poor, blind, blank Greg and flock around him; they saw him as having achieved “detachment,” as an Enlightened One.

memory cut off by 1970, or before. He was caught in the sixties, unable to move on. He was a fossil, the last hippie.

He seemed to have no sense of “next” and to lack that eager and anxious tension of anticipation, of intention, that normally drives us through life.

Inside the Garden we found the special place reserved for Greg’s wheelchair near the soundboard. And now Greg was growing more excited by the minute; the roar of the crowd excited him—“It’s like a giant animal,” he said—and the sweet, hash-laden air. “What a great smell,” he said, inhaling deeply. “It’s the least stupid smell in the world.”

Neither a biological nor a psychological nor a moral-social viewpoint is adequate; we must see Tourette’s not only simultaneously from all three perspectives, but from an inner perspective, an existential perspective, that of the affected person himself. Inner and outer narratives here, as everywhere, must fuse.

Bennett sometimes calls Tourette’s “a disease of disinhibition.” He says there are thoughts, not unusual in themselves, that anyone might have in passing but that are normally inhibited. With him, such thoughts perseverate in the back of the mind, obsessively, and burst out suddenly, without his consent or intention.

But being a loner and taking long hikes by himself toughened him as well, made him resourceful, gave him a sense of independence and self-sufficiency.

“It’s not gentle,” he said to me. “You can see it as whimsical, funny—be tempted to romanticize it—but Tourette’s comes from deep down in the nervous system and the unconscious. It taps into the oldest, strongest feelings we have. Tourette’s is like an epilepsy in the subcortex; when it takes over, there’s just a thin line of control, a thin line of cortex, between you and it, between you and that raging storm, the blind force of the subcortex. One can see the charming things, the funny things, the creative side of Tourette’s, but there’s also that dark side. You have to fight it all your life.”

is difficult for Bennett, and is often difficult for Touretters, to see their Tourette’s as something external to themselves, because many of its tics and urges may be felt as intentional, as an integral part of the self, the personality, the will.

Cézanne once wrote, “The same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending more to the right or left.”

“Now that I’ve felt it I can see.” So it was with Virgil and the gorilla. This spectacular example of how touching could make seeing possible explained something else that had puzzled me.

(Normally, half of the cerebral cortex is given over to visual processing.) But in Virgil these cognitive powers, undeveloped, were rudimentary; the visual-cognitive parts of his brain might easily have been overwhelmed.

It has been well established that in congenitally deaf people (especially if they are native signers) some of the auditory parts of the brain are reallocated for visual use.

Would it be like a baby first learning to see? (This was Amy’s first thought.) But the newly sighted are not on the same starting line, neurologically speaking, as babies, whose cerebral cortex is equipotential—equally ready to adapt to any form of perception. The cortex of an early blinded adult such as Virgil has already become highly adapted to organizing perceptions in time and not in space.

An infant merely learns. This is a huge, never-ending task, but it is not one charged with irresoluble conflict. A newly sighted adult, by contrast, has to make a radical switch from a sequential to a visual-spatial mode, and such a switch flies in the face of the experience of an entire lifetime.

Such conflicts are built into the nature of the nervous system itself, for the early blinded adult who has spent a lifetime adapting and specializing his brain must now ask his brain to reverse all this. (Moreover, the brain of an adult no longer has the plasticity of a child’s brain—that is why learning new languages or new skills becomes more difficult with age. But in the case of a man previously blind, learning to see is not like learning another language; it is, as Diderot puts it, like learning language for the first time.)

One does not see, or sense, or perceive, in isolation—perception is always linked to behavior and movement, to reaching out and exploring the world.

When a specific organic weakness exists, emotional stress can easily press toward a physical form; thus, asthmatics get asthma under stress, parkinsonians become more parkinsonian, and someone like Virgil, with borderline vision, may get pushed over the border and become (temporarily) blind. It was, therefore, exceedingly difficult at times to distinguish between what was physiological vulnerability in him, and what was “motivated behavior.”

neurologist Henri Gastaut wrote an important memoir on van Gogh, in which he presented the case for van Gogh having not only temporal lobe seizures but a characteristic personality change with the onset of these, gradually intensifying for the rest of his life.

possible role of temporal lobe epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s life and writings, and by the early seventies had become convinced that a number of patients with TLE showed a peculiar intensification (but also narrowing) of emotional life, “an increased concern with philosophical, religious and cosmic matters.”

paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia—for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled.

One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect; this comes only with changes and separations in life—separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved.

There is nothing cameralike, nothing mechanical, in Edelman’s view of the mind: every perception is a creation, every memory a re-creation—all remembering is relating, generalizing, recategorizing.