An Anthropologist on Mars

Summary (from the publisher):
The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special place in the swarm of mind-brain studies. He has done as much as anyone to make non-specialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of "the human mind."

The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in The Medical Detectives. Sacks's stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie.

The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thinking in Pictures gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968.

Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled.

Review: "'Much of the time,' she said, 'I feel like an anthropologist on Mars'" (259).

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has presented the stories of seven neurological disorders in this fascinating inside look into the complexities of the human mind. The individuals discussed within this work include a painter who only sees the world in black and white, a man whose brain tumor radically altered his personality, a surgeon who can still operate despite having severe Tourette's, a man who had his sight restored after a lifetime of blindness, an artist who is captivated by the inner imagined landscape of his childhood home, an autistic boy who despite severe social deficiencies has been a great artist from a young age, and Temple Grandin, possibly the most famous and high achieving autistic individual known.

Sacks' description of these rare and unusual neurological conditions was fascinating. For example, the author describes in detail the effects of the patient who suffered from a brain tumor, and seemed unaware of the fact that he was now blind. Likewise, the patient struggled with conceptualizing time; "his sense of there being two Connies, his segmenting Connie into two, was characteristic of the bewilderments he sometimes found himself in, his need to hypothesize additional figures because he could not retain or conceive of an identity in time" (52). Similarly, for the patient who spent most of his life blind, the surgery restoring physical sight did not make him a seeing person: "When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. [...] But when Virgil opened his eye, after being blind for forty-five years - having had little more than an infant's visual experience, and this long forgotten - there was no visual memories to support a perception; there was no world of experience and meaning awaiting him. He saw, but what he saw had no coherence" (115).

I thought it was interesting that Sacks chooses to devote two of the seven individuals detailed in this book to autistic individuals, rather than move on to a seventh distinct condition. However, for the average reader, this topic is likely the most relevant and it is certainly the most prominent condition known to us. Although I am of course familiar with autism, I enjoyed Sacks debriefing of the history and commonalities of autism, which I didn't know much about it. "Autism, clearly, is a condition that has always existed, affecting occasional individuals in every period and culture" (190). It was intriguing to learn that about 10% of autistics have savant like capabilities, including Stephen, the autistic boy who is capable of very detailed and realistic drawings from a very young age. However, for savant talents, they do not develop over time, but emerge "fully fledged from the start" (225). In addition, I enjoyed the chapter on Temple Grandin since she is a well known figure, and furthermore, one of the only autistic people who has detailed how her world is different from the average person, a very remarkable insight into the autistic perception.
Additionally, Sacks does a great job of being measured and objective in his judgment regarding neurological diagnosis. For example, in one of the lengthy footnotes he addresses the modern day propensity to diagnosis famous historical figures with now known conditions. "The danger is that we may go overboard in medicalizing our predecessors (and contemporaries), reducing their complexity to expressions of neurological or psychiatric disorder, while neglecting all other factors that determine a life, not least the irreducible uniqueness of the individual" (165).

I did wonder what the take away from this book was for the reader. This is no cure or solution to many of the problems described within, and furthermore, for Temple Grandin, she doesn't want a "cure" but likes the individuality she brings to the world. Rather, Sacks seems just to be illustrating the complexity of the brain by offering seven oddities for our examination. I also wondered what advances or new medical knowledge has emerged since this book was published in 1995. While there are certainly still not definite solutions to major neurological disorders, I imagine that significant new developments have emerged in the nearly twenty years since Sacks reported on these remarkable individuals.

Stars: 4