The Man Who Tasted Words
A Neurologist Explores the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In The Man Who Tasted Words, Guy Leschziner leads readers through the senses and how, through them, our brain understands or misunderstands the world around us.
Vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are what we rely on to perceive the reality of our world. Our senses are the conduits that bring us the scent of a freshly brewed cup of coffee or the notes of a favorite song suddenly playing on the radio. But are they really that reliable? The Man Who Tasted Words shows that what we perceive to be absolute truths of the world around us is actually a complex internal reconstruction by our minds and nervous systems. The translation into experiences with conscious meaning—the pattern of light and dark on the retina that is transformed into the face of a loved one, for instance—is a process that is invisible, undetected by ourselves and, in most cases, completely out of our control.
In The Man Who Tasted Words, neurologist Guy Leschziner explores how our nervous systems define our worlds and how we can, in fact, be victims of falsehoods perpetrated by our own brains. In his moving and lyrical chronicles of lives turned upside down by a disruption in one or more of their five senses, he introduces readers to extraordinary individuals, like one man who actually “tasted” words, and shows us how sensory disruptions like that have played havoc, not only with their view of the world, but with their relationships as well. The cases Leschziner shares in The Man Who Tasted Words are extreme, but they are also human, and teach us how our lives and what we perceive as reality are both ultimately defined by the complexities of our nervous systems.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neurologist Leschziner (The Nocturnal Brain) takes a fascinating deep dive into the functions and malfunctions of the five senses in this sharp account. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to "recreate our environment from scratch at every single moment," he writes; instead, it attempts to come up with the most rational explanation for the inputs it receives from the senses. When any component of this intricate system is altered or stops working, a person can experience the disruption in several ways, including illusions, delusions, and hallucinations. Those effects are brilliantly illustrated with eye-opening case studies: some people never feel pain because of a genetic condition; others lose their visual memory after a stroke; and one woman experienced vivid hallucinations shortly after losing her vision ("I began to see zombie faces; still cartoonish, but scary all the same—blood dripping from their eyes, and gnarly teeth"). Leschziner makes a solid case that each sense is worthy of awe in its own way, but he tends to get bogged down in neurological terminology that lay readers may find hard to parse. Still, those who stick around will find this packed with insight.