An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too—for if they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may force the nervous system into making other paths and ways, force on it an unexpected growth and evolution.

am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of “health” and “disease,” to see these in terms of the ability of the organism to create a new organization and order, one that fits its special, altered disposition and needs, rather than in the terms of a rigidly defined “norm.”

when my father was reluctantly considering retirement at ninety, we said, “At least drop the house calls.” But he answered, “No, I’ll keep the house calls—I’ll drop everything else instead.”)

Most interesting of all, the sense of profound loss, and the sense of unpleasantness and abnormality, so severe in the first months following his head injury, seemed to disappear, or even reverse.

does not deny his loss, and at some level still mourns it, he has come to feel that his vision has become “highly refined,” “privileged,”

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

The huge scandal of leucotomy and lobotomy came to an end in the early fifties, not because of any medical reservation or revulsion, but because a new tool—tranquillizers—had now become available, which purported (as had psychosurgery itself) to be wholly therapeutic and without adverse effects.

between psychosurgery and tranquillizers is an uncomfortable question that has never been really faced. Certainly the tranquillizers, if given in massive doses, may, like surgery, induce “tranquillity,” may still the hallucinations and delusions of the psychotic, but the stillness they induce may be like the stillness of death—and, by a cruel paradox, deprive patients of the natural resolution that may sometimes occur with psychoses and instead immure them in a lifelong, drug-caused illness.

But the relation of disease and self, “it” and “I,” can be particularly complex in Tourette’s, especially if it has been present from early childhood, growing up with the self, intertwining itself in every possible way. The Tourette’s and the self shape themselves each to the other, come more and more to complement each other, until finally, like a long-married couple, they become a single, compound being. This relation is often destructive, but it can also be constructive, can add speed and spontaneity and a capacity for unusual and sometimes startling performance.

Bennett himself, lying half-curled on the floor, kicking and thrusting one foot in the air, described an unusual case of neurofibromatosis—a young man whom he had recently operated on. His colleagues listened attentively. The abnormality of the behavior and the complete normality of the discourse formed an extraordinary contrast. There was something bizarre about the whole scene, but it was evidently so common as to be unremarkable and no longer attracted the slightest notice. But an outsider seeing it would have been stunned.

much of the past five weeks had been devoted to the exploration of objects, their unexpected vicissitudes of appearance as they were seen from near or far, or half-concealed, or from different places and angles.

His depression deepened, he became ill, and, two years after his operation, S.B. died. He had been perfectly healthy, he had once enjoyed life; he was only fifty-four. Valvo provides us with six exemplary tales, and a profound discussion, of the feelings and behavior of early blinded people when they are confronted with the “gift” of sight and with the necessity of renouncing one world, one identity, for another.

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.

By midmorning, I had been enthralled again by Franco’s paintings but had had enough of his reminiscences. He had one subject only—could talk of nothing else. What could be more sterile, more boring? Yet out of this obsession he could create a lovely, real, and tranquil art.

It was in this religious spirit, then, that Franco, after a brief struggle, accepted his visions and now dedicated himself to making them a palpable reality. Though he had scarcely painted or drawn before, he felt he could take a pen or brush and trace the outlines that hovered so clearly in the air before him or projected themselves, as

Franco himself was amazed by this painting, by the fact that he could paint, could express himself in this wonderful new way. Even now, a quarter of a century later, he remains amazed. “Fantastic,” he says. “Fantastic. How could I do it? And how could I have had the gift and not known it before?”

Certainly when I first saw Franco seized by a vision, and noted his staring eyes, his dilated pupils, his raptus of attention, I could not help wondering whether he was having a sort of psychic seizure.

Such seizures are associated with epileptic activity in the temporal lobes of the brain.

What of neurotic or hysterical memories or fantasies, which also seem immune to time? In

One feels that there is some element of fixation or fossilization or petrification

It was singular to hear this elaborate fantasy from Franco, this fantasy with elements of Sophocles and Homer no less than the New Testament, for he had never read, never heard of, Sophocles or Homer.

It was medically described, almost simultaneously, in the 1940s, by Leo Kanner in Baltimore and Hans Asperger in Vienna. Both of them, independently, named it “autism.”

After all this testing, I was still bewildered. Stephen seemed so defective, and so gifted, simultaneously; were his defects and his gifts totally separate, or were they, at a deeper level, integrally related?

Vladimir Nabokov possessed, in addition to his many other talents, a prodigious calculating gift, but this disappeared suddenly and completely, he wrote, following a high fever, with delirium, at the age of seven. Nabokov felt that the calculating gift, which came and went so mysteriously, had little to do with “him” and seemed to obey laws

Stephen had no scientific knowledge or interest, could not, I suspect, have grasped any of the concepts of geology, and yet such was the force of his perceptual power, his visual sympathy, that he would be able to get, and later draw, the canyon’s geological features with absolute precision, and with a selectivity not to be obtained in any photograph.

have since heard that an autistic artist is employed by the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew).

whether this hyperfocus of attention—an attention as narrow as it is intense—is a primary phenomenon in autism or a reaction or adaptation to an overwhelming, uninhibited barrage of sensation. A similar hyperfocus is sometimes seen in Tourette’s syndrome.)

she had written to B. F. Skinner, the great behaviorist, and finally she had visited him. “It was like having an audience with God,” she said. “It was a letdown. He was just a regular human being. He said, ‘We don’t have to know how the brain works—it’s just a matter of conditioned reflexes.’ No way I could believe it was just stimulus-response.”

was an era of exceptional cruelty, both in animal experimentation and in the management of farms and slaughterhouses. She had read somewhere that behaviorism was an uncaring science, and this was exactly how she herself felt about it. Her own aspiration was to bring a vivid sense of animals’ feelings back into husbandry.

A similar shackling of cattle, and hanging them upside down so that the blood rushes to their heads before their throats are cut, is a common sight in old kosher slaughterhouses, she said. “Sometimes their legs get broken, they scream in pain and terror.” Mercifully, such practices are now starting to change. Properly performed, “slaughter is more humane than nature,”

What is terrible, the more so because it is avoidable, she feels, is pain and cruelty, the introduction of fear and stress before the lethal cutting; and it is this that she is most concerned to prevent. “I want to reform the meat industry. The activists want to shut it down,” she said,

was struck by the enormous difference, the gulf, between Temple’s immediate, intuitive recognition of animal moods and signs and her extraordinary difficulties understanding human beings, their codes and signals, the way they conduct themselves.

Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of these social signals.

employees in slaughterhouses, she notes, rapidly develop a protective hardness and start killing animals in a purely mechanical way: “The person doing the killing approaches his job as if he was stapling boxes moving along a conveyor belt. He has no emotions

Others, she reveals, “start to enjoy killing and … torment the animals on purpose.”

“Nobody should kill animals all the time,” she said, and she told me she had written much on the importance of rotating personnel, so that they would not be constantly employed in killing, bleeding, or driving.

would she, I wondered, be able to understand apes (who have some “theory of mind”) as well as she understood cattle? Or would she find them bewildering, impenetrable, the way she found children and other human beings? (“

farm animals, I feel their behavior,” she said later. “With primates I intellectually understand their interactions.”)