Representation and Reality: An Anthropologist on Mars

Introduction

Dr.Oliver Sacks writes a captivating account of seven different case studies,seven different people, with a cornucopia of cognitive disorders ranging fromautism to colorblindness. He prefaces his book by pointing out the benefits ofdisease, that from disease derives a world of alternative coping mechanisms, anunderstanding of how things normally work by understanding how things go wrong,and how debilitation is often coupled with other cognitive gifts. Sacks doesnot fail to see and capture the people is his case studies, but sometimes hispersonal feelings toward his patients are all too obvious (Sacks, pp. 10-115). His style of writingis most like a narrative, and although this made for a good reading I felt the amountof details and anecdotes describing the personalities of his patients were muchricher and clearer than the scientific background.

Each case is full of unexpected discoveries, and one could write pages on one casealone. For this reason I will focus on one case study involving several big themes we covered this year. The case I examine below perfectly illustrateswhat we have learned about vision, that what we see and experience is truly inour heads, and that the brain and the “I” are truly dynamic.

Discussion and Analyisis

An Anthropologist on Mars is split into seven sections, each section dealing with patients and colleagues of the author's with different types of neurological conditions that the author believes to have resulted in them living in a different "world". In the "Case of the Colorblind Painter", an artist looses his ability to perceive color after an accident. After detailing the painter's case, the author uses it as a way to give the history of our current understanding of how vision works, and what can be learned from the artist's inability, not just to see color, but to remember it. Similarly, in "The Last Hippie", after telling the reader how the patient the author is describing came to be in his present state, a small history of knowledge about the functions of the frontal lobes of the brain, as well as some of the problems that come from damage to these lobes, is given. From there, the author looks at different types of memory and how they interact with one another (Sacks, pp. 10-115). In the first chapter Sacks writes of an extremely successful painter, Mr. I, whosuffered from complete achromatopsia (colorblindness) after a car accident,which was either caused by or resulted in damage to his secondary visualcortex. Mr. I's case was special because it is extremely rare to becomecolorblind, and even complete congenital colorblindness is rare. I found thischapter fascinating because Sacks and his partner an ophthalmologist, Dr.Wasserman, found that Mr. I didn't see in black and white, he didn't see anycolors, but actually saw pure wavelengths (Johns, pp. 51-99). This case study should havecoincided beautifully with our study of sight, but the given cause of Mr. I'scolorblindness at first confused me. We learned in class that lateralinhibition, which functions in the mammalian retina, gives us consistency incolor and contrast across borders, ...