Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks once wrote, are travellers to
unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven
such travellers - including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of
Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all
sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and
creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot
decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a
career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. These are
paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other
modes of being that - however abnormal they may be to our way of
thinking - may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The
exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a
consulting room or office, and Sacks has taken off his white coat and
deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own
environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but
most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls,
house calls at the far border of experience. Along the way, he shows us
a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds.
In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take
for granted - the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of
color - Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.
