Source of book: I own this
I have enjoyed reading Oliver Sacks over the years. (See list at the bottom of the post.)
Sacks was a neurologist who eventually became a writer. He was that rare combination of a brilliant practicing doctor and an effective and compelling writer.
An Anthropologist on Mars consists of seven case studies of particular people with brain issues and how they affected their lives. It was written 30 years ago, so there are some things that haven’t aged that well. Medicine has made some progress since then, and terminology has changed. This is most apparent in the two final chapters, about individuals on the autism spectrum.
I mention this mostly to give some warning that Sacks’ understanding of autism at the time the book was written was less thorough than it is now. That said, because Sacks’ general approach to all the people he writes about is thoroughly empathetic and respectful, any errors are of excusable ignorance, not condescension or disrespect.
As with all of Sacks’ books, he is able to include an incredible amount of science and medicine without losing the reader. His ability to explain complex neuroscience in understandable ways yet without oversimplifying, is amazing.
Probably the best way to go through the book is one chapter at a time.
Starting with the introduction, Sacks makes clear that this book is, more than anything, about human adaptation.
For me, as a physician, nature’s richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life.
He also mentions G. K. Chesterton’s famous character, Father Brown, as an inspiration for his approach. Rather than looking at people from the outside as specimens, he tries to get inside them, to see life from their perspective. And that is what he does in this book.
In the first chapter, Sacks looks at an artist who was in a vehicle accident that led to a stroke, and caused him to lose his color vision. Or, more accurately, the part of his brain that processes and interprets color.
He retained the physical ability of his eyes to sense different wavelengths, and transmit the information to his brain. But the brain couldn’t understand color anymore, causing both a loss of all color, and significant discomfort in bright light.
Sacks gets really deep into the science in each chapter, leading to a lot of fascinating passages. One that stood out in this chapter was his description of how early color film worked, and how a lot fewer colors are needed to create an entire spectrum than you would think. In fact, you can do nearly everything with just two. Why is that?
These demonstrations, overwhelming in their simplicity and impact, were color “illusions” in Goethe’s sense, but illusions that demonstrated a neurological truth - that colors are not “out there” in the world, nor (as classical theory held) an automatic correlate of wavelength, but, rather, are constructed by the brain.
We really do not know why we experience colors the way we do - it is one of the weirdest human experiences, if you think about it. Why are red, blue, and green, and the rest experienced in a vivid and, well, colored way? But many of our senses are like that. Hearing, for example - we hear frequency as pitch, and combinations as timbre and harmony.
Another thing that gets mentioned is that in World War Two, people with severe red-green colorblindness were used as spotters because they saw through camouflage better than normal-sighted people.
The next chapter is a truly bizarre story. “Greg,” a young man from New York City, turned hippie, embracing the Grateful Dead particularly. But he ended up rejecting the drug culture and instead joined a Krishna monastery.
There, he pretty much disappeared from his family, and seemed well on his way to a particularly impressive degree of transcendendance.
He was also slowly losing his vision.
Eventually, his parents found him in a near catatonic state, got him medical attention, where it was discovered that a benign tumor had crushed significant parts of his brain.
While the tumor was removed, much of his function never came back.
A significant loss was the ability to remember things. Prior to the tumor, the memories remained intact in large part. But afterward, he couldn’t make new memories, except for his ability to learn new Grateful Dead songs, interestingly. He was perpetually stuck in the present.
Sacks spent significant time with him, and details much of the experience in this chapter.
One of the questions with patients with this particular damage is exactly what is there of “them” left? Is there anything deeper than the surface, the now, the moment? Sacks spent enough time to come to an interesting conclusion.
Greg’s “frontal lobe” characteristics - his lightness, his quick-fire associations - were fun, but beyond this there shone through a basic decency and sensitivity and kindness. One felt that Greg, though damaged, still had a personality, an identity, a soul.
This is in contrast to some other people with similar damage who became feral, unable to process normal human emotion. (The chapter discusses a number of cases, some from the previous century.)
The third chapter is all about a surgeon with Tourette’s Syndrome.
I am not making that up. This was a real person, living and practicing in Canada.
The chapter was fascinating for many reasons, not least of which was that this man was highly skilled at surgery, which seemed to, for the duration, mask his symptoms. Similarly, he could fly his small airplane with great skill, even with certain symptoms evident.
Between Sacks’ skills at communicating with people, and the highly expressive intelligence of the surgeon, there is an incredible amount of inside information in this chapter. You really do get inside the head of the surgeon - how he experiences his own brain, thought process, physical movements, and so on.
What I was not at all expecting was that a certain amount of this actually felt familiar. While I do not have symptoms at the level of being diagnosed with Tourette’s, some of the brain things actually resonate for me.
I have always had a highly active internal conversation going on. I talk to myself, as my wife can attest. I get certain phrases that repeat in my brain. I have a few minor tics.
What I don’t have is the compulsions, or the difficulty in focusing on reading.
So, I am kind of curious if this is part of the nature of my own neurodivergence.
I might write about that someday in another post. I have known I was neurodivergent since I was a small child, but still haven’t found any recognized description of a particular kind to fit.
I know I am a divergent thinker in general. I have a highly active interior life of the mind, as I noted. I seem to see the world differently than most people. I have never cared particularly about creating an image, and don’t worry about how people see me. Thus, I don’t care about fashion, or being cool.
But I don’t fit the usual categories of neurodivergence. I flirt around the edges on a few of the autism spectrum traits, such as social awkwardness, but definitely do not fit others. (In fact, reading the two chapters on autism in this book made it clear that autism does not fit me much at all. For example, I am a good multitasker, I make and keep friends normally, and I make integrated connections really well - that perhaps is one of the strengths of this blog. There are some small overlaps in traits, and I get along well with people with autism generally.) I am definitely not ADHD - I concentrate quite well, either on a single task, or on multiple tasks at once, as required.
As I said, nothing really quite fits. But I am definitely some sort of neurodivergent. And some of the descriptions of experiencing one’s own brain from this chapter did resonate with me.
I’ll talk a bit more about this regarding the autism chapters.
Next up is another fascinating chapter, about a man whose eyesight was partially restored, but with unexpected results.
Apparently, this isn’t uncommon. People who go blind at a young age often do not develop the brain connections for interpretation of what they see, and thus regaining sight can be a curse, not a blessing.
I didn’t write down any quotes here, but will say that, like the first chapter, there is a remarkable amount of deep diving into the neuroscience of sight.
The next chapter is about a painter, Franco Magnani, whose photographic memory of his hometown, and ability to recreate it practically stone for stone in his paintings, despite not visiting for decades, was legendary.
The chapter explores the questions of memory and of obsession. Sacks theory is that Magnani experienced some form of psychic seizure, which historically has been associated with both mental illness and divine inspiration. Dostoevsky is another artist who may well have had this syndrome.
Norman Geschwind spoke about the possible role of temporal lobe epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s life and writings, and by the early seventies had become convinced that a number of patients with TLE showed a peculiar intensification (but also narrowing) of emotional life, “an increased concern with philosophical, religious and cosmic matters.”
That passage also triggered something in me. My mother has epilepsy, controlled by medication, but still something that affects her brain. And a certain amount of what is described above sounds a lot like the way she has changed over time.
When I was young, she had a far broader intellectual life, introducing me to literature that still inspires me. Over time, however, she became intensely focused on increasingly narrow interests. Primarily “alternative medicine” pseudoscience, and the religious equivalent. I wonder if she has continued to have TLE that doesn’t manifest as physical seizures, and has been in part a cause of the changes in her.
Also interesting in this regard is the way that Magnani had, as Sacks describes it, a relationship with his mother that was “a sort of pre-Oedipal, almost symbiotic intimacy and closeness.” He was her favorite child, and after her death, he seems to have transferred that to his wife Ruth. He literally couldn’t paint in the period between his mother’s death and the start of his relationship with his wife.
This reminds me a bit of the thoroughly enmeshed relationship of my mother and my sister, her favorite child. They cannot function without each other.
A final interesting note is this one, about the way that Magnani’s art is an idealized childhood, not the complicated reality that Magnani knows his actual childhood was.
But all this is edited out in his art, where a paradisiacal simplicity prevails. One finds the belief in a happy childhood “even in people who have undergone cruel experiences as children,” Schachel writes. “The myth of happy childhood takes the place of the lost memory of the actual…experience.”
As I have reprocessed my own childhood in light of my later rejection by my parents, I have had to look at this. After all, much of my childhood was indeed happy and good. But that doesn’t negate the bad things I experienced, the authoritarian parenting, the abusive theology, the emotional blackmail.
I took a lot more notes on the final two chapters, about autism, than the others combined. One reason for this might be that autism runs strongly in my wife’s family - her dad’s side.
Another might be that for some reason, I have always tended to be friends with people on the autism spectrum - in fact, I still have friends dating back to my childhood. A few years ago, I noticed that this has been a pattern my entire life. I attract people with autism somehow. And honestly, these are really good people who are a valued part of my life. (Which is one reason I am so furious at RFK Jr. and others who are dismissive and disrespectful of neurodivergent people, claiming they will never have fulfilling lives.)
The two chapters explore different parts of the spectrum. The first, about prodigies, is all about people who have a singular skill and focus that goes along with deficits in other areas. The second is all about Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous person with autism of the 1990s. And, I will say, Temple Grandin is a gas. Throughout that entire chapter, she is delightful and eccentric and fun and unexpected. Which, come to think of it, is a good description of many people with autism that I know.
First, let’s start with this truth that Sacks states clearly, the truth that antivaxxers reject, the truth that far too many people who find the existence of neurodivergent people inconvenient reject.
Autism, clearly, is a condition that has always existed, affecting occasional individuals in every period and culture. It has always attracted in the popular mind an amazed, fearful, or bewildered attention (and perhaps engendered mythical or archetypal figures - the alien, the changeling, the child bewitched).
Yes, autism has existed since humans did. It exists in every culture, at every time in history. It is nothing new. We just understand it better. And we now understand that it is a spectrum, not a single presentation.
All this talk about increasing autism rates is baloney. We previously categorized so-called “high functioning” individuals as simply eccentric, rather than understanding them to be neurodivergent, having a different brain operating system than neurotypical people.
The particular focus of the chapter is on “Stephen,” a young boy with an unusual ability to draw - mostly buildings - with adult-level sophistication and detail. Stephen is also autistic. Again, Sacks shows his amazing ability to connect with people in his conversations and interaction with Stephen. It’s quite interesting to see him get into Stephen’s head effectively.
Although, as I said, the book doesn’t include the last 30 years of increased knowledge, it does hint in some of the directions that things would go. For example, Sacks notes:
Stephen, it was clear, had a very limited ability to imagine others’ states of mind.
But Sacks also understands that this is not a lack of empathy at all - Stephen shows kindness, and concern for others’ pain. He just struggles to translate the full spectrum of human emotions in interactions with others.
That said, Sacks also notes that individuals with autism are often impressive in their ability to learn the skills necessary. Adaptation, as he says in the introduction. The brain finds work-arounds, and things improve with age. I too have noticed this. It happens at different rates and to different degrees, and as Grandin notes, a person with autism may never feel “natural” or “comfortable” with it, but the adaptation occurs.
This also raises the point that this adaptation needs to go both ways. Normies need to learn to adapt to existing with neurodivergent people as well.
Another passage in this chapter is interesting. Sacks’ impressions here are based on many hours of conversation with Stephen, not just instinct.
As Stephen watched all this intently, I thought of the thousands of images he must be registering, constructing - all of which he could convey in vivid pictures and vignettes, but none of them, I suspected, synthesized into any general impression in his mind. I had the feeling that the whole visible world flowed through Stephen like a river, without making sense, without being appropriated, without becoming part of him in the least. That though he might retain everything he saw, in a sense, it was retained as something external, unintegrated, never built on, connected, revised, never influencing or influenced by anything else.
To be clear, this is only one way autism can manifest, and many people with autism can in fact integrate a lot better. Including Temple Grandin. But there is also a degree to which autism does sometimes seem to make sorting more difficult, or at least different.
For me, the integration of everything is how I naturally think. Readers of this blog will note that I draw many associations into my posts, seeing connections where others do not. That is my particular tendency in thinking and learning, more as a connected building rather than a focused accumulation of specific facts.
Finally, we reach the last chapter. The first thing I want to note is that the two early researchers on autism are mentioned quite a bit. These days, Austrian Hans Asperger has gotten most of the press, since his name was once used for “higher functioning” autism. Deservedly, his reputation has plummeted due to his collaboration with the Nazi regime during World War Two. The extent to which this collaboration went is unclear, other than that, like most people of his time and place, he went along with things rather than protest and risk his position.
That said, the other guy who simultaneously came up with “autism” as the label for the syndrome, Leo Kanner, was far worse. While Asperger believed that there were positive and compensating features of autism, “a particular originality of thought and experience,” Kanner considered autism to be pure negative.
Despite the negatives for both men, though, the detail of their careful work is still the gold standard for our modern understanding of autism. So, yeah, complicated.
Sacks, of course, does get the causes of autism right, unlike the “alternative medicine” and antivax crowd today.
It is probably mostly genetic - Sacks states that it is biological, and in many cases genetic. That’s why it can run in families.
However, he does note as well that there are some rare cases of it being acquired. For example, metabolic disorders like PKU, if not treated, can lead to late development of autism.
The one that I didn’t know, but that is one that really needs to be publicized is the fact that babies who are infected with Rubella (aka German Measles) are significantly more likely to develop autism.
So, if that wasn’t clear enough, it is the ANTIVAXXERS themselves who will be creating preventable autism, because of their false belief that the MMR vaccine (the “R” is for Rubella) is the cause of autism. I just can’t even with people like that. And with Andrew Wakefield, who I sincerely hope will experience cosmic justice for his greedy fabrications.
Next up is from a footnote, and it is one of the few areas where I have some connection to autistic traits.
Authentic memories from the second (perhaps even the first) year of life, though not available to “normals,” may be recalled, with veridical detail, by autistic people.
While I do not have super-detailed memories from my extreme youth, I actually do have vivid, if brief, memories of specific events when I was age two, from riding in a U Haul when we moved to Montana, to a little bridge on the dirt road we lived on there, to red ants in the basement, to the installation of a wood stove and chimney. Yes, I could probably today pick out the exact sort of materials used.
So I guess I am sort of like that? I definitely have earlier memories than most people I know.
Here is another one that I found interesting, regarding Temple Grandin.
In her ingenuousness and gullibility, Temple was at first a target for all sorts of tricks and exploitations; this sort of innocence or guilelessness, arising not from moral virtue but from failure to understand dissembling and pretense (“the dirty devices of the world” in Traherne’s phrase), is almost universal among the autistic.
My own experience is different - I have never been particularly gullible, and actually have a highly functional bullshit detector, something my parents do not appreciate at all. But I loathe dissembling and pretense more than anything. I despise being lied to with a boiling passion. If you want to lose me as a friend faster than anything, just lie to me.
Related: I will likely never participate in organized religion again. And I will never see my parents as actual Christ-followers ever again. They lied to me about what they actually believed, and then resented me for expecting them to honor the values they taught me. I can’t forgive that.
So, I guess maybe that is one reason I get on so well with friends with autism? They don’t do bullshit, which is a real positive for me. Later, Sacks describes Grandin in terms of the positives.
Temple’s attitudes seem similar to this: she is very aware (if only intellectually, inferentially) of what she is missing in life, but equally (and directly) aware of her strengths too - her concentration, her intensity of thought, her single-mindedness, her tenacity; her incapacity for dissembling, her directness, her honesty. She suspects - and I, too, was coming more and more to suspect - that these strengths, the positive aspects of her autism, go with the negative ones.
Again, I both see myself in some of these - I think intensely, although I don’t have the single-mindedness so much. I am a lousy liar, and tend to be very direct. And these are things I appreciate in my friends with autism.
I agree with Grandin very much in that she thinks that the negative traits of autism are given far too much attention, at the expense of appreciating the positive ones. I would go so far as to say that a society with autism is a far better one than that without. Which is one reason why RFK Jr. and his ilk are misguided in trying to “cure” or “eliminate” autism. Instead, all of us need to learn how to better integrate everyone into our society.
She [Grandin] thinks that she and other autistic people, though they unquestionably have great problems in some areas, may have extraordinary, and socially valuable, powers in others - provided that they are allowed to be themselves, autistic.
I very heartily agree.
[Side note here: a lot of what makes it harder for people with autism to fit into our current society is that our current society rewards certain personality traits at the expense of others. For example, extroversion is rewarded, introversion is punished. And, worst of all, sociopathic liars are rewarded, while truth tellers are punished.]
Another Temple Grandin trait that I can recognize in myself, although at the level she does it, is the ability to think visually. At the very basic, testable level, I am excellent at rotating objects in three dimensions in my mind. And I can visualize complex mechanical things quite well. I realize this is not the way everyone thinks or experiences life.
One that I did not recognize in myself was that Grandin said that she did not experience the sense of the sublime at seeing nature. “Pretty, yes. Sublime, I don’t know.” That’s an interesting experience. I would imagine it is not a universal trait of autism, but I have known people who felt that way.
In contrast, Grandin does feel transcendence in matters of morality.
Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, for her, is clearly not just the law of the land but, in some far deeper sense, a divine or cosmic law, whose violation can have disastrous effects - seeming breakdowns in nature itself.
This trait too, is socially necessary, and the lack of it in certain subcultures is horrifying. I too have a strong sense of morality, something my parents have never really understood. Particularly since their view, the view that the authoritarian parenting guru charlatans instilled in them, is that morality is nothing more than unquestioning obedience to authority. That I might object to doing things their way on moral grounds, and that I might see their beliefs as immoral, remains disturbing to them. One reason we are estranged. But I was like this as a child too, having my own strong moral sense that often conflicted with their demands. I wasn’t rebellious. I just refused to subordinate my own morality to theirs.
So, I guess in summary, while I don’t really fit with the traits of autism, I have some overlap in personality in ways that make me greatly appreciate the many positives of neurodivergence.
The book is named after a line from Temple Grandin, who said that living among neurotypical humans felt like being an anthropologist on Mars, learning to interact with the aliens through observation and practice.
Perhaps many of us, neurodivergent or not, have felt like this at one time or another. But also, like Grandin, have found our place anyway.
Like all Sacks books, this one was a really fun and informative read. He really was a treasure, and his good will and thoughtfulness endure in his books. If you haven’t read him, I highly recommend it.
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