Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Oliver Sacks: The Mind's Eye

So this evening on behalf of Harvard bookstore I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Oliver Sacks and Colin Murphy to the stage to discuss Oliver Sacks most recent book The Mind's Eye. Colin Murphy is the editor at large at Vanity Fair and was the managing editor at The Atlantic Monthly where he worked for over 20 years. Mr. Murphy has also authored a number of books including rubbish the Arcola archaeology of garbage. The word according to Yves his most recently highly acclaimed book Are We Rome the fall of an empire and the fate of America was published in 2007. I am so pleased that he is here with us tonight. I'm going to turn the instructions to him now. But first ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming both of our guests. Colin Murphy and Dr. Oliver Sacks. Thank you very much Heather and thanks to all of you for joining us this evening. And thanks especially to Oliver Sacks who will talk to us about his new book The Mind's Eye and other topics. The format for the next hour or so will be the usual one.

Will be talking with Oliver Sacks about this and that for half an hour or so and then we'll open up the conversation to questions from you. So the standard protocol here is that people who need no introduction get one anyway. It's a particular pleasure to be here with you tonight Oliver but by way of full disclosure I'll own up to the fact that you and I share a corporate connection. Both of us publish some of our work for The New Yorker under the auspices of the publishing behemoth condé Nast who is building in New York is known to writers as the Death Star. But but it's a good Deathstar because it publishes you. Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University and he also holds the title of Columbia University artist which I think means something like Do whatever you want. He was born in London attended Oxford became a doctor and in the mid 1960s moved to the United

States where he has lived and worked ever since. By the 1970s Oliver Sacks had added a burgeoning literary career to his clinical practice producing one bestseller after another. Almost all of his books have been centered around accounts of acute and sometimes bizarre neurological disorders. But in Oliver Sacks his hands we come to understand that the abnormal often offers a portal into the normal Sachs's a superb stylist and it obviously runs in the family. His first cousin was the late Abba Eban the Israeli diplomat and no slouch when it came to matters of the pen. We all use a kind of shorthand to describe certain genres of work and everyone knows what you mean when you say and O'Henry story a John Cheever story of John McPhee story and to this we can add an Oliver Sacks story. Oliver Sacks His latest book his 11th is the mind's eye a series of case studies involving people with impairments to certain sensory capabilities. For instance

people who cannot recognize faces people who cannot recognize everyday objects people who cannot see in three dimensions. People who continue to write even though they have lost the ability to read and as will see as I hope you'll explain. Oliver Sacks himself in this book comes under his own scrutiny in a deeply personal way. So it's a pleasure to have you here. And let me begin by asking a foundational question about how you came to pursue the interests that you that you have pursued. I know that as a boy you were deeply interested in chemistry. You were a child during the Blitz and I know you have memories of the Blitz. I can't help but wonder how those scenes of physical and psychological trauma may have affected you. Could you just put us in mind of some of the formative experiences that that turned your mind in the direction that it turned from.

Well in the war. I was evacuated and separated from my parents for four years and put it on a school with a somewhat capricious somewhat sadistic headmaster and so would I return to London at the age of 10. I very much wanted to order and predictability and science seemed to promise that and chemistry in particular. But both my parents were physicians and both in fact had studied new ology but then gone on to general practice and the house was full of medical talk. My two older brothers were medical students and then doctors. There was a special interest in the visual I think partly because I had visual migraine and then attacks a visual migraine

colors may change. Objects may flatten out. You may see giant scintillating arcs. I was very bewildered and frightened when I first had an attack at about four or five and I mentioned that to my mother who also had such attacks and she explained that this was in terms intelligible to her 5 year old. Although I think a precocious one that this was the visual cortex haven't found. Them and that's a was or all settle down and leave no trace. After a few minutes. And so what had been fighting then became I think for me an early and rather precocious portal to your word into brain function and gave me the strongest feeling that that all experience was related to brain function on the visual side. I was also passionately attached to photography but in particular to colour

photography in stereo photography which was a way of wondering how. How we construct colour and depth and in my first book on migraine. A third of the book is devoted to visual experiences and vision has always been a hot topic for me and also a personal topic for you now you experience something that has a long name that I can't pronounce which is prosopagnosia. You do it very well. But you've had a lot of practice. Was that something also that you were aware of as a as a child and can you tell us what that is. I think not as a child but. When I was in high school. I am. I am.

It was apparent that I had difficulty recognizing people. I could be with people all day and then five minutes later not recognize them. This was a source of embarrassment and annoyance and sometimes offense and sometimes outrage. It was thought that I was snooty or peculiar or maybe I am in additional. Bar. But this this brought home to me although I don't think I mentioned it to others that I had a peculiar difficulty recognizing faces and that until people spoke. Or unless they had some very striking single feature for example on the Amtrak train coming here it was a train conductor with a gigantic beard. Who looked just like the the the Goodger postman. I don't mean to go get who I mean.

The. And also at that point I became very fond of going for bicycle rides. But I got lost for easily. I am. I sometimes didn't even recognize my own street and so I always had to go with someone and so I recognize then that I was deficient or defective in these areas. But I didn't know what was part of a syndrome and I don't think I felt that way too. I visited my brother in Australia an older brother whom I had with him for 30 years. He had exactly the same problem. And then I thought the two of us must have some some family genetic condition. As I recall there was a footnote in your wonderful book that relates exactly to this.

You wrote a memoir called Uncle Tungsten and as I recall when you put a picture of Uncle Tungsten you put in the wrong picture or Saddam and his his family were furious. It's. My. Mom. My mother was was one of Uncle tanks and it was one of eighteen children and I had nine uncles and I put in another call but. I could tank some children said the two of them looked nothing like each other. Anyhow I correct the mistake in the paperback. So let's let's talk a little bit about your your new book because it bears directly on some of the issues that you've been talking about before getting to the personal part of the book. Let me ask you about some of the case studies. They're united largely by the common theme of visual perception or the lack of it and they're deeply haunting and in some cases they're actually

inspiring and and happy. You know a haunting story is one about a woman who can no longer read and can recognize colors but not shades. So she tries to organize her life by grouping things according to color and then gets thrown in this in the spice cabinet because everything has a red top and then there's the story of a woman who has had. An opposite kind of story a woman who has had monocular vision all her life and then suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision later in life and her entire view of things changes. I wonder can you give us one of these case studies and tell us why it is that the pathologies of vision seem to speak so central to our sense of ourselves. Well most I get hundreds of letters

and from people who tell me of their experiences most of these are experiences of loss and sometimes cries for help but especially an unusual one was. Related to a very different experience. This was someone whom I met at a launch party some years before her husband was an astronaut and we got talking then and she mentioned that she'd been born with a squint with crossed eyes and and though she had had various operations the eyes alternated. So she was only using one eye at a time. I asked if this affected her life much and she said no she said she

she could play a mean game of tennis and that she sometimes teased binocular athletes by suggesting they wear a patch and then they would miss the ball by 20 feet and she would drive a car into most other things. And I said to her but can you imagine binocular vision or a stereo. And she said Oh I think so she said I'm a professor of neurobiology. I've read all the relevant papers. So I left it there but then 10 years later she sent me a letter she would call this conversation and she said I was wrong and she said she and now she could say this books into him she had developed stereo vision and she said no information no imagination could do justice to the wonder of it. She'd been to a vision therapist

and had had some training. And then she said she went out to her car one day and the steering wheel was popping out of the dashboard. And first she thought this was some bizarre or something to do with the afternoon sun. Then she closed one eye and the other and she realized that this was it. This was the mysterious vision which everyone else had on most other people had. It. It was something she was in rapture with this and many years later she's still in that chair. She she says she she said she couldn't imagine a parallel unless it was that of someone totally colorblind or who had never encountered colors suddenly being in a world of color. And the. There was a certain fullness and flatness to experience and perhaps a feeling that she was looking at a picture and could not

enter into a space. In some sense in some way she didn't have a sense of space nor quiet of herself as a being or a thing in space. And and this has now changed changed completely and something which one might think is this is as trivial as using two eyes rather than one is absolutely essential to one's visual being in the world. And so I was very struck by that. And in recent years you have had reason to be struck even more powerfully by this because one of the stories that is told in the mind's eye is Oliver Sacks going in the other direction. About a third of the book. Takes the form of diary extracts in which Oliver is recounting the progress and the aftermath of a disease you're diagnosed with ocular melanoma.

And I wonder if you could take us through you know in a brief way that that particular circumstance and what happened to you how you coped in the aftermath but come back also to this notion of seeing with one eye versus two. Well I'm nearly five years ago in just before Christmas some who five I am was a weekend a Saturday morning I started as I do every morning with a swim and then I thought I go and see a movie and I was sitting watching the previews when I suddenly became conscious of some fluttering and a sort of sparkle to my left. And at first I thought Ah this is one of those visual migraines. But then

it was apparent that this was a different creature and that it was affecting one eye only and was not in the brain. I said my green is and. The fluttering became stronger. It was a brilliant incandescence. And then I realised that I couldn't see the lights in the cinema going out on the left and a chunk of my visual field was missing at that moment. I sort of panicked. I wondered what was happening. I wondered if if the retina was detached if I was bleeding in the eye if I was going to go blind. But I also didn't know what to do. So I sat still hoping it would get better by itself and it didn't. And that afternoon I went to see an ophthalmologist and described things to him and he went and looked in my eye

to look at me in a different way. I had sort of being Akali before now I was a patient and he said I had something behind the retina and he would refer me to a colleague. And I saw his colleague who is in fact the man to whom I did dictate the book a couple of days later and I went through various tests and then I was shown a model of the eye and a black object like a sort of wrinkled cabbage a small black cap which was put there and this for me meant you have a tumor it has a black tumor it has a melanoma. And when I was a medical student melanomas were a death sentence but he was quick to say that melanomas in the eye were much more benign. They rarely spread

and they could be pretty effectively treated. That's in the old days you'd remove the eye. You couldn't let it stay there but now you could radiate it. So I had radiation and lasering. And I had various visual symptoms as well other ones if I want to say more interesting once the an area of the visual field was missing with that eye. This was a scotoma. But the scotoma for me was rather like a window because I would see figures and landscapes and um and charming little hallucinations. Inside the secretary. I could easily ignore these but I was some if I had nothing better to do. I sometimes. Gazed at them.

Later I started getting very cross distortions with the vision of that high in this book for the first time ever I've put some of the grotesque drawings which had made these include a drawing of people as I saw them at one point when they were enormously elongated and attenuated and tilted to one side. And see now you say that they're grotesque but you also compare them to Vango. Well no that was the I'm doing it. I think actually the data line is I think I'll like I compared them. Oh that's right Al Greco. I however am. I would also sometimes if I looked at her face or anything else there would be a sort of diffusion of the flesh and sort of protoplasmic sort of translucent swellings would appear that reminded me a bit of Francis Bacon face.

And this these would in effect on a fast vision generally and an eye increasing He kept the eye closed or wore a pad and the tumor was very close to my Favia the fixation point with you know with the most acute vision and I knew that if that was destroyed I would lose central vision of that ice so-called. But by this time. Well then I did have a procedure which removes Center which remove the rest of the tumor. In fact this was a great relief because instead of seeing grotesque distortions I simply had no more competition from the side. And effectively I found myself one on the now. I loved stereoscopic vision. I mentioned that

I used to do stereoscopic photography as a boy. I was an active even ardent even fanatical member of the New York stereoscopic society which consisted of fellow nuts. And time when even when I was a little boy I would find that closing one eye instantly flattened the world for me though this was not so apparently for most people. So I thought whether. I thought probably I was more biased toward stereo and I probably saw the world more deeply than other people and so I had such a passion for stereo was now the first monocular member of the new stereoscopic. If I came in somewhat hesitantly it's books I don't see steps. All I see is as lines on the ground

the. Accommodated to some extent and when I call someone a glass of wine I don't port straight into their lap as as I would do originally only to some extent. I am really the near and far are conflated for me as it will on a single plane. What I think I mentioned in the book that on one occasion when my music teacher my piano teacher was introducing a new piece I am I saw slivers of wood twigs coming out of her arm or into her. And then I realize that in fact these slippers twigs were on a tree 200 foot away across the road where she was too far away but I can't really distinguish two feet from two hundred feet and. So with me I sometimes have Styria

dreams. I love I love them stereo dreams for me with dreams of looking into a stereoscope and now I still have these. But when I wake to a very flat cluttered world with no space between things everything is on top of each other. My fan is about to crash into my bedside lamp. I know that there's six foot between them but so far as I'm concerned they are about to collide. Oddly though. It's a couple of researchers here at Harvard have suggested that Rembrandt. Which is why I come onto this a bit later. And that Rembrandt with his wife set slightly divergent ties could not have had binocular vision. They

feel the same of. Some other artists who did self-portraits and they feel in fact that binocular vision may interfere. With the practice of painting or photography with photography. Of course most people use. If find a single viewfinder. Of course I had a stereo camera but most people don't and they will sometimes look through a tube. And they wondered whether. Renouncing or not having binocular vision might actually be an advantage to an artist am. I thought this was an absurd theory until I lost my own binocular vision and now I have to say the world is somewhat like a painting or cinema screen. Before that there were objects situated in space. Now are

only surfaces juxtaposed with one another. Well you'll be able to to see some of those drawings for yourself in the book because you've reproduced about 10 of them. Yeah a few. The other thing and possibly the reason why hit the microphone. The. Last year I had a hemorrhage the which removed the little vision it had. And now I see nothing to the right of my nose I can't see my hand and I'm losing this chunk of vision. Well it was also it in one's imagination or one's mind's eye. And the day this happened or the day after I am I ventured out onto Greenwich Avenue a very crowded street in New York and I was absolutely terrified because people suddenly materialized on the right.

I got no warning there was no peripheral vision to alert me. And I was crashing in to them and I went out with Kate my assistant editor and friend. She she stood guard on the right when I got back to the building. I got in the elevator and waited for her and she didn't come and I thought maybe she's checking the mail speaking to the doorman until a voice her voice said What are we waiting for. And I turned around with some difficulty because somehow the idea of things of anything being on the right side is gone. I found she was there. Well not only had she come in without my seeing her but it hadn't occurred to me that she could have done that and still a year later it doesn't occur to me that that anything can happen there. Although I have to make a special effort to sort of and to turn around and Pia

and to try to just sort of crane here at PEOPLE disconcerts them. They feel they're being safe while they are being stared at. So I chose my seat wisely. Yes. No I lose things and people to my right. One of the issues that you talk about in your book and it relates exactly to this has to do with the relationship between visual perception and simply the way the mind is structured to think and you give an example for instance of a particular person who at one point had had sight and then had lost his sight. And this person writes about the fact that over time concepts like here and there lose meaning and the faces and faces the facing facing.

And I wonder if can you can you talk a little bit more about that this relationship between site and the ordering of the mind. Yes. Well these these were described by me in a very remarkable book or a memoir by a man called John Holly Hughes who a professor of theology in England. The but I have to sort of describe my world as as having become flat. And for me near and far have have disappeared. But if one is completely blind I think one's entire sense of space may collapse or disappear. And of relationships in space as when people are facing each other or two objects for. For

John how space was recreated party as an ordinary space but the effects of losing a sense of very very very profound. This doesn't happen to all people who when I wrote an article I wrote a review of how Spock because I thought this was what might happen happened to all blind people. And I got an onslaught of puzzled sometimes indignant letters from blind people who said this hadn't happened with them. Some of them said they lost their site 30 years before and they were still very visual and one woman said I could see my hands as that typing. And it became apparent to me then. That there are many different responses to losing one's science. I think the most striking. Was mentioned

by an Australian philosopher and psychologist who who was blinded by a chemical explosion when he was 20 he was told to turn to the other sensors and he he refused. He'd actually he was the son of a film director who'd been in his father would ask him to visualize scenes and he he determined to create a virtual world of sight in place of the actual one. And to have a sort of controlled hallucination if you want of the world and he has become a virtuoso there and indeed there's a whole as category a sort of subspecies of the visual blind it's fascinating you you just use the phrase about different responses to a particular trauma. And I think anyone who has read a lot of your work has that very matter in mind continually.

On the one hand you are presenting these case studies you've done scores of them at this point. On the one hand the readers reaction is my God what a fragile thing. My mind is what little provocation it takes to alter it in some catastrophic way. And on the other hand the reader also thinks oh my god what a durable thing. My mind is how inventive and adaptable it is and this tension runs through many if not most of the case studies that you talk about. And I wonder if you could say a few words about that tension. Yeah I know. Well you're exactly right and I think coming I think this hit me especially with my Awakenings patients who had been felled

sometimes overnight by a disease. And you should say these are sleeping sickness. But by and by the sleeping sickness and within and some zombie like state for decades. And and yet when they came to although some of them had lost 30 or more years of their lives doctors that come from their 20s to their 60s the 1920s in the 1960s they were able to reconstruct their lives remarkably. But in general as you imply my my enthusiasm and my feeling is to do with survival. I want to say I love to see the different ways in which people survive after seemingly catastrophic things. And

and some of this is human conscious consciousness ingenuity. But some. Occurs quite automatically. Instead I haven't mentioned animals non-human animals in this book but I got a letter a couple of days ago from a woman who told me that you're going to say from an animal. She says Heck her cat lost an eye and a fight and she now observes that when the cat is going to pounce it moves its head quickly from side to side and then pounces. So the alpha cat didn't figure this out. It just happened. I am I think one of the most remarkable adaptations. I describe in the book is

with regard to a novelist Howard Engel a very good Canadian novelist who. One morning. Had breakfast felt fine went down to get the newspaper which the Toronto Globe and Starbucks looked OK at a distance but which was unintelligible when he brought it to his eyes he thought it was in some strange fallen script. He said it was like Serbo-Croatian I don't know such language Serbo-Croatian V. And his first thought was that the this in fact had been printed from an ethnic minority in Toronto and has somehow been placed on his doorstep by mistake. But then when he opened the paper or the advertisement swell like that he realized he'd had a stroke. He he he went into his library he hope books were different but his entire library had become unintelligible

to him. And as a lifelong passionate reader and a writer he was he was he was he was terrified of this condition of suddenly losing the ability to read or Alexia doesn't mean that one can't write. In fact he could write but he couldn't read what he'd written. And he didn't know how he could continue very remarkably. And this was not an asset of his conscious doing. He started to find that he could read a bit and he went to be retested but the Alexiou was still total. But what was happening at that stage was that he was involuntarily copying letters with his index finger and then moved on to involuntarily

copying things with his tongue. On the back of his teeth or the roof of his mouth. So reading for him became like eating or caulking with his tongue. And that worked worked pretty well. But other people with Alexia might find completely different ways. Extraordinary story. But as you say we are infinitely fragile and infinitely tough both. So in just a moment I'd like to turn this over to questions from the audience so if you could think about your questions right now and I'll ask you one more slightly embarrassing question. I'm thinking I'm thinking of my sins. It's not it's not that embarrassing but I hope you don't give the right I especially to church. I bet I I be ready to confess all. I'm not sure this church believes in Zen

but. You can say it for a person who reads non-fiction. You can't help but be struck how many physicians are terrific writers. You know Louis Thomas and and chape Nuland and Jerome Groopman and yourself you know you almost think that instead of going to the Iowa Writers Program you should go to medical school. And. How did you learn to become the kind of writer that you became. I have anything to do with you know writing medical histories or what isn't. Well I I never did a writing course saw anything like that at home. At school. Essay writing was it was a central thing in English history. I am.

I've kept journals full for more than 60 since I was 14. I am I sort of it was an imperative need of something if I was going through something unusual if experience was intense. I had to somehow translate it or transform it into words. Now both my parents as I said. Doctors in the house was full of medical talk. Doctors of storytellers. And I think as you suggest for me the case history became the central sort of exemplar or pit of nonfiction writing. But although I haven't stuck to case histories I have sort of written a few other things I have I have to do it it somehow came to me I

should say that the first draft of what I write is often monstrously hyperbolic and. I depend on revising with a cooler head to get at also on my my good editors to to cool things down and move me from contradiction and hyperbole to my old reasonableness. Well I wanted to ask you. It's a pleasure to be here and to hear you speak. You were talking about catastrophic events. And my wife had a catastrophic event of having a stroke and I was wondering because you've talked a little bit about case histories and change of personality. My wife sort of struggled before the stroke with depression but she's now had these incredible barriers of aphasia and specificity and being confined to a wheelchair and yet she's incredibly joyful. And I was wondering

could you speak a little bit about it when someone's had a catastrophic event and that that change of personality. Yes actually in that way. Well precisely such a change as you describe is described in one of the stories of my book about a woman prone to severe depression who has a catastrophic stroke as paralyzed and loses expressive speech and realizes that's life as it was lived before in some sense is was over. But in fact this woman has become my patient has become a sort of genius at communicating in non-verbal ways and I mentioned her daughters felt wondered why she didn't commit suicide. But on the contrary now she is she really was so glad to be

alive and to be able to communicate and that people's good feeling for her. I don't know how much was an organic change in the brain something sort of you know as a lobotomy might do and how much is just a reaction to having something catastrophic about surviving. And then then life is infinitely dear to one. And one is infinitely grateful and one feels that is a blessing you know you. It sounds like the microphone is working fine. Is that right for everybody. Great thanks. I want to thank you first for work which is based on inquiry and curiosity and not just a deficit model. I frequently work with people who have extraordinary ability in visual processing memory perception with concomitantly weak auditory skills and vice versa.

I wanted to ask if you see that frequently and whether you think it's ever the case that the prodigious strength keeps the weaker thing from developing as opposed to a model where you've got a compensatory mechanism. Well this is a good deep question and I and I don't know that it's going to be I'm either either or the. Congenitally blind children. Well I should say that say absolute pitch is fairly rare like one in 10000 in professional musicians is one in 15 in the congenitally blind is one and two. And and this this probably goes with the fact that the the blind infant and the blind child has to solve all possible meaning out of the outer the auditory world. And they

they become gifted that way this can happen in adulthood as well. I mentioned how how who would become blind in his 40s. Found himself becoming more adept at construct creating auditory space to make up for the visual space which he lost and something called Williams Syndrome. All the people with Williams Syndrome seemed to be enormously sensitive to music and many of them are gifted whereas they have major major visual difficulties. But then the fun parts of their brain they're also very very talkative. Yes. And and and endearing and make contact with them invariably the front part of the brain is well-developed where music and language are involved.

The back part of the brain where vision is as poorly developed so so this may just be the way their brain is with dyslexia which has now been a as affecting 10 15 percent of the population that's common to have visual gifts whether it's a compensation or what. So I don't know. I mean all I can do and I've had all I do is multiply examples. Thank you. All right. Good evening Dr. Sacks. I'll start by measuring something which I wasn't going to mention because I think you get a lot of questions on it but given the previous jump. Talk about traumatic catastrophic injury. I've spent most of my spare time the last four years researching Phineas Gage and in the course of that I've read a lot of warrior. And so I said that's a really a lot of work. Yes. I was very struck by your introduction to his

works. That you've written probably very very long ago and I would be interested to hear just any reflections you have about work. I just I found your treatment of him as an introduction to what not putting you on the spot. Well this is a I'm I'm not sure what to say if my my idol got that impression. In 1968 Louis was a great Russian neuropsychologist I should say a Soviet neuropsychologist although he spent he spent his entire life somehow dealing with the murder of a murderous bureaucracy which could have put him in the gulag at any point. But in addition to pioneering detailed study of the brain he he he loved to look at individuals in great depth and not

just as the previous person said in terms of their deficits but in terms that impact the sort of life they lead. I read one of his books called the mind of an eminence about a man extraordinarily gifted in memory and imagery but strangely defective in some other ways. I was the first 30 pages of this thinking it was a novel and it had the pathos and the poignancy and the humor and the drama and. And then I realized in fact it wasn't a novel but it was a case history and the most detailed and in the way objective case history I had I'd ever read but Lewis this case histories have been have been a sort of model model for me. But there's but I could go on too long about him. Well thank you for that.

I really appreciate your reflections. Dr. Sacks excuse me. I personally would like to thank you for your brilliant mind and as a teacher I was struck by your cancer about survival for people who are struck this way and it struck me that there's almost a model for how genetics works and how evolution works where these people are given a genetic package that unless they choose to survive and or find a niche with that survival skill can flourish that in fact could be a pathway to another genetic pathway into the future. And I was just struck by that and I think I might use that in the classroom as I talk about genetics and evolution because I think to a certain extent you do. It happens to you. Be a part of that process and when you're struck the way you've described. But I did have one short question. The people who have face blindness do they use careening accessories like eyeglasses and earrings and necklaces

to you know get through some of that vagueness. Oh absolutely. So you would be remembered by your beard. Although you might be confused with other bearded people. And I should say in relation to that. But I've always apologize to a large bearded man. In Miras. And. Dumb and that on one occasion when I was at a restaurant with tables outside I got a pop up to do my I was sort of combing myself. And then I realized that my reflection was not combing itself. But on the other side inside the restaurant there was a I'm a man with a beard who was puzzled. As to why I was preening myself in front of.

My boss. Yeah yeah. It has to be extraneous features and this is a reason why I and other face blind people fall caricaturist and cartoons easier to recognize because a salient feature gets exaggerated. Thank you very much. I to work with autism for 17 years. He just met a colleague who I hadn't seen hear and read on your books and I have a couple of questions about sensory integration. I was using sort of avant garde techniques to change the inside from the outside. Now I'm afraid I'm ignorant then I can't say anything on that. OK. All right. I think my answers are. And the second question. OK. I second my second question is on synesthesia. If you'd like to comment on why colour's seemed to have specific emotions.

Yeah. Yeah it's actually talking about it with synesthesia. One sense one sensation one mood one sense is converted into another one. So that for example one might see color associated with with music sometimes if one had absolute pitch with a particular Keys this is not something which is this is something which is built in people who have synesthesia have synesthesia back to their first memories the coupling a particular coupling and they have never changes throughout life and time. And this is not just a metaphor or a fanciful way of doing things. If you say to functional brain imaging you may find that when music is played the parts of the brain concerned with color light up at the same time. The

colleague of mine compares synesthesia to metaphor to creativity. I think I disagree with him because I think metaphor and creativity essentially open and flexible and synesthesia has a fixed and rigid so often delightful quality. I speak as I speak in envy because I don't have it except briefly if I'm stoned. Right. Why does certain colors have specific emotions. Is it from inside. I made it for you. But I don't think that's so generally as I'd to ask about autism. I read reports by parents who say that their children become almost normal when they have a fever and I wonder if you speculated about why that might be or read any suggestive speculations about that. And then I also wanted to compare it to one of your patients stories I'm

told that children with autism if you put them in front of a toy piano will play one note indefinitely. It doesn't occur to them to move one note over one way or the other. And one of your patients stories concerned a man with Tourette's syndrome who was a jazz pianist and they gave him an anti dopaminergic medication to control the Tourette's which worked when he found he couldn't improvise. So if I recall the story correctly he went off his meds on the weekends so that he could play jazz and then went back to it on Monday so he wouldn't curse at his wife at random times and things like that. And I'm wondering if a child getting autism and a child with autism getting a fever is sort of in the state of this guy going off his meds. Yeah. Is dopamine more active during a fever or do we have any other knowledge of what happens that might be useful in explaining this. Well that's very interesting. I haven't heard that before but I will I will try to sort of find out more.

I think fever could have have all sorts of effects on one. And it's one is usually not so much normalized by fever has made delirious but yeah. But I'm thinking first for certain mental functions it can be helpful to have more noise in the system and for most of us that perhaps fever puts us us all a state of a higher noise to signal ratio. And for most of us that might be bad but perhaps for someone with autism it really a good thing. They make such incredibly precise distinctions and they're unable to give them up. And maybe in a fever they can give them up maybe. I'm sorry I was reading recently about working involving people who are considered blind even though their retinas and optic nerves are fine because of some damage further back in the brain and

apparently in some of these cases the people can actually see to a certain extent not not read and watch movies but distinguish objects and walk down the hall without bumping into tables because some other area of their brain can take over. I wonder if you could elaborate on that and if that maybe has something to do with some of the adaptations in cases where the eyes aren't actually destroyed. Yeah absolutely. Well Tom blindsight is used of this phenomenon when people. Who maintain that they see nothing will nonetheless. If they're asked to guess what is happening what is being held and fond of them. Will guess right. They will guess this is two fingers or five fingers or that as a cube rather than a sphere. And as you say they may be able to thread their way around an obstacle

course this. And this can occur even if the visual cortex has been been severely damaged. But it seems as if more primitive parts of the visual pathway can give one this sort of implicit unconscious notion of vision. But then why should this be restricted to the blind. Maybe all of us have this sort of sight. As well as more conscious vision. The one of my patients the lady whom you mentioned who finally became unable to recognize objects and how to organize them by color. But even though she couldn't recognize objects sometimes she she could instantly categorize them as as living or non-living. And

one she had to use guessing as well and sometimes in a fascinating way one can guess right when one has no knowledge available to consciousness. I think this is a deep subject and perhaps one to end with is that this is certainly something we all use because if the person can guess whether it's living or not living. A lot of complicated information is being processed somewhere. Thank you