What it's Like To Be Someone Else: An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks)

 Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) The title quotes Temple Grandin, one of seven people whose brains function outside the range now labelled “neurotypical”, a term Sacks never used.
     The book begins with “Jonathan I”, an artist whose suffers a high fever, and wakes up unable to see colour. He’s even unable to remember colour. Being achromatic (lovely word, I think) is barely imaginable by anyone who grew up with black-and-white films. But being unable to recall colour, that’s impossible for us to imagine.
     Sacks’s gift is to convey something of the feeling of what it’s like to be the persons he describes. In doing so, he provides evidence that we perceive only what the brain can construct from the inputs of the senses, and that perceptions will vary with differences in the brain. People who are born with unusual brains, or who suffer lesions in the brain, are natural experiments in the range of possible human existence.
     For Sacks also sees that we are what we perceive. Changes in our perceptions are also changes in our selves. Our sense of self, our self-awareness, is part of the totality of perceptions that give us the experience of reality. Sacks’s case histories show that while we cannot fully imagine another person’s experience, we can know where and how our experience differs from that of others.
    Science is the attempt to describe, and the arts are attempts to share, our common experience. Sacks is one of the rare people who can combine these two modes of insight. Any of his books are worth reading. ****