An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

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

These then are tales of metamorphosis, brought about by neurological chance, but metamorphosis into alternative states of being, other forms of life, no less human for being so different.

Total colorblindness caused by brain damage, so-called cerebral achromatopsia, though described more than three centuries ago, remains a rare and important condition. It has intrigued neurologists because, like all neural dissolutions and destructions, it can reveal to us the mechanisms of neural construction—specifically, here, how the brain “sees” (or makes) color.

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.

Such keen, fierce attention to every detail, such constant looking below the surface, such examination and analysis, are characteristic of the restless, questioning Tourettic mind.

he remarked that I had seen only some of the outward expressions of his Tourette’s, and these, bizarre as they occasionally seemed, were by no means the worst problems it caused him. The real problems, the inner problems, are panic and rage—feelings so violent that they threaten to overwhelm him, and so sudden that he has virtually no warning of their onset. He

“Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries,” wrote William Harvey, in the seventeenth century, “than in cases where she shows traces of her workings apart from the beaten path.”

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Savant talents do not seem to connect, as normal talents do, to the rest of the person. All this is strongly suggestive of a neural mechanism different from that which underlies normal talents.

She said that she could understand “simple, strong, universal” emotions but was stumped by more complex emotions and the games people play. “Much of the time,” she said, “I feel like an anthropologist on Mars.”