An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

His despair of conveying what his world looked like, and the uselessness of the usual black-and-white analogies, finally drove him, some weeks later, to create an entire grey room, a grey universe, in his studio, in which tables, chairs, and an elaborate dinner ready for serving were all painted in a range of greys.

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.

This living-in-the-moment, which was so manifestly pathological, had been perceived in the temple as an achievement of higher consciousness.

It would help to have an image of the brain with its anatomy labeled to get a better idea of this description.

Years can pass, in a sort of timeless limbo, with few, and certainly no memorable, markers of the passage of time.

Greg knew only presence, not absence. He seemed incapable of registering any loss—loss of function in himself, or of an object, or a person.

But he no longer wants to go home, on weekends, on Thanksgiving, as he so loved to—he must find something sad or repugnant in the fatherless house now, even though he cannot (consciously) remember or articulate this. Clearly he has established an association of sadness.”

This part is so interesting, how he can’t articulate or “remember” his father dying but implicitly he’s behaving as if he does. To me, it suggests our emotions not only resides in our conscious thoughts but also guides our behaviors separate from conscious thoughts. That you can behave in a way you may not completely register or understand based on how you feel, even when you’re not consciously aware of these emotions.

Rodolfo Llinás and his colleagues at New York University, comparing the electrophysiological properties of the brain in waking and dreaming, postulate a single fundamental mechanism for both—a ceaseless inner talking between cerebral cortex and thalamus, a ceaseless interplay of image and feeling, irrespective of whether there is sensory input or not. When there is sensory input, this interplay integrates it to generate waking consciousness, but in the absence of sensory input it continues to generate brain states, those brain states we call fantasy, hallucination, or dreams. Thus waking consciousness is dreaming—but dreaming constrained by external reality.

Biggest mindf*ck on waking and dreaming.

The nature of the “organic unity,” at once dynamic and semantic, which is central to music, incantation, recitation, and all metrical structures, has been most profoundly analyzed by Victor Zuckerkandl in his remarkable book Sound and Symbol. It is typical of such flowing dynamic-semantic structures that each part leads on to the next, that every part has reference to the rest. Such structures cannot usually be perceived, or remembered, in part—they are perceived and remembered, if at all, as wholes.

Easier for amnesiacs to remember as a “whole.”

Touretters are also drawn to athletics, partly (one suspects) because of their extraordinary speed and accuracy,9 and partly because of their bursting, inordinate motor impulse and energy, which thrust toward some motor release—but a release that, happily, instead of being explosive, can be coordinated into the flow, the rhythm, of a performance or a game.

We, with a full complement of senses, live in space and time; the blind live in a world of time alone. For the blind build their worlds from sequences of impressions (tactile, auditory, olfactory) and are not capable, as sighted people are, of a simultaneous visual perception, the making of an instantaneous visual scene.

perceptual-cognitive processes, while physiological, are also personal—it is not a world that one perceives or constructs but one’s own world—and they lead to, are linked to, a perceptual self, with a will, an orientation, and a style of its own.

Gregory and Valvo dilate on the emotional dangers of forcing a new sense on a blind man—how, after an initial exhilaration, a devastating (and even lethal) depression can ensue.

Now, at last, Virgil is allowed to not see, allowed to escape from the glaring, confusing world of sight and space, and to return to his own true being, the intimate, concentrated world of the other senses that had been his home for almost fifty years.

This chapter’s take on identity is so interesting. I notice I’m not that interested in learning about vision, but agnosia definitely piques my interest.

Sensation itself has no “markers” for size and distance; these have to be learned on the basis of experience. Thus it has been reported that if people who have lived their entire lives in dense rain forest, with a far point no more than a few feet away, are brought into a wide, empty landscape, they may reach out and try to touch the mountaintops with their hands; they have no concept of how far the mountains are.

In 1956 the French 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.

The sort of memories for which Proust sought, and for which Franco seeks, are elusive, shy, nocturnal; they cannot compete with the full light, the bustle, of daily life—thus they must be invoked, conjured up, like dreams, in quiet and darkness, in a cork-lined room, or a mental state akin to trance or reverie.

“I shall make Pontito again for you, I shall create it again for you.” And when he did his first painting—of the house where he was born—he sent it to her; in some sense he was redeeming his promise to reconstruct Pontito for her.

But it is precisely such a 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.

Hypothesis: we only recollect or remember events that have great emotional magnitude like separating from something or someone we truly loved or hated. It is natural to remember being exiled and a lot of art is centered on exile but for Franco it’s taken this to another level.

Imaginative memory not only stores for us the passing moments of perception; it also transfigures distances, vivifies, defangs—reshapes formed impressions, turns oppressive immediacies into wide vistas … loosens the rigid grip of an acute desire and transforms it into a fertile design.

again for you.”

So were the seizures in the temporal lobe only a hypothesis? Because Franco sounds more like a savant to me..

Normal talents do not come and go in this way; they show development, persist, enlarge, take on a personal style as they establish connections, and embed themselves, increasingly, in the mind and personality. They lack the peculiar isolation, uninfluenceability, and automaticity of savant talents.9

Creativity has to do with inner life—with the flow of new ideas and strong feelings.