An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks
Read by Jonathan Davis

Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks has written, 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 except
when 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 has great difficulty deciphering 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 Dr. 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 borders of experience.

Along the way, he gives 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.