An Anthropologist on Mars

Seven Paradoxical Tales
Author: Oliver Sacks
Book website

My rating: 3*
Although the subject and cases presented are very interesting, the author's writing style was hard to follow and bland.

Keywords: colorblind, brain tumor

The book is consisting of seven medical case histories of individuals with neurological conditions: an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia or the inability to perceive color due to brain damage; the case of a man suffering from the effects of a massive brain tumor, including anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960's; a surgeon and amateur pilot with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon is often beset by tics, but these tics vanish when he is operating. More...

Quotes:
'Defects, disorders, diseases [...] can play a paradoxical role, by bringing our latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. The paradox of disease, in this sense, is its 'creative' potential...'

Interesting:

• constant use of one finger in reading Braille leads to huge hypertrophy of that finger's representation in the cortex
• brain tumor caused damage to [his] pituitary gland; this was responsible not only for his gain in weight and loss of body hair [...] but his abnormal submissiveness and placidity (due to hormonal changes n.a.)
• damage to frontal lobes produce a subtler and profounder disturbance of identity

Phrenology = a pseudo scientific system that is based on the idea that indentations and convolutions form on the human skull because of the presence or absence of certain mental faculties. Phrenologists believe that they can read a person's character and mental state by the overall shape of the skull. Phrenology has long been dismissed as a pseudoscience, in the wake of neurological advances. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Phineas Gage = probably the most famous patient to have survived severe damage to the brain. He is also the first patient from whom we learned something about the relation between personality and the function of the front parts of the brain. Click here for more info