An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

  He started becoming a “night person”, in his own words, and took to exploring other cities, other places, but only at night. He would drive, at random, to Boston or Baltimore, or to small towns and villages, arriving at dusk, and then wandering about the streets for half the night, occasionally talking to a fellow walker, occasionally going into little diners: “Everything in diners is different at night, at least if it has windows. The darkness comes into the place, and no amount of light can change it. They are transformed into night places. I love the nighttime”, Mr. I. said. “Gradually I am becoming a night person. It’s a different world: there’s a lot of space—you’re not hemmed in by streets, by people—It’s a whole new world.”

  Mr. I., when he was not traveling, would get up earlier and earlier, to work in the night, to relish the night. He felt that in the night world (as he called it) he was the equal, or the superior, of “normal” people: “I feel better because I know then that I’m not a freak—and I have developed acute night vision, it’s amazing what I see—I can read license plates at night from four blocks away. You couldn’t see it from a block away.” 30

  30. With his revulsion from color and brightness, his fondness of dusk and night, his apparently enhanced vision at dusk and night, Mr. I. sounds like Kaspar Hauser, the boy who was confined in a dimly lit cellar for fifteen years, as Anselm von Feuerbach described him in 1832:

  As to his sight, there existed, in respect to him, no twilight, no night, no darkness—At night he stepped everywhere with the greatest confidence; and in dark places, he always refused a light when it was offered to him. He often looked with astonishment, or laughed, at persons who, in dark places, for instance, when entering a house, or walking on a staircase by night, sought safety in groping their way, or in laying hold on adjacent objects. In twilight, he even saw much better than in broad daylight. Thus, after sunset, he once read the number of a house at a distance of one hundred and eighty paces, which, in daylight, he would not have been able to distinguish so far off. Towards the close of twilight, he once pointed out to his instructor a gnat that was hanging in a very distant spider’s web. (pp. 83-4)

  One wonders whether his night vision might, with time, have taken on heightened function in compensation for the damage to his color system—there might, at this stage, also have been a heightening of movement sensitivity, perhaps of depth sensitivity, too, possibly going with an increased dependence on and use of the intact M system. 31

  31. It may be that individuals with congenital achromatopsia develop heightened function of the M system, and may be extraordinarily adept at spotting movement. This is currently being investigated by Ralph Siegel and Martin Gizzi.

  Most interesting of all, the sense of profound loss, and the sense of unpleasantness and abnormality, so severe in the first months following his head injury, seemed to disappear, or even reverse. Although Mr. I. does not deny his loss, and at some level still mourns it, he has come to feel that his vision has become “highly refined”, “privileged”, that he sees a world of pure form, uncluttered by color. Subtle textures and patterns, normally obscured for the rest of us because of their embedding in color, now stand out for him. 32

  32. Irecently heard of an achromatopic botanist in England said to be even better than color normals at swiftly identifying ferns and other plants in woods, hedgerows, and other almost monochromatic environments. Similarly, in World War II, people with severe red-green colorblindness were pressed into service as bombardiers, because of their ability to “see through” colored camouflage and not be distracted by what would be, to the normally sighted, a confusing and deceiving configuration of colors. One veteran of the Pacific theater reports that colorblind soldiers were indispensable in spotting the movement of camouflaged troops in the jungle. (All of these things may also be clearer to color normals at twilight.)

  He feels he has been given “a whole new world”, which the rest of us, distracted by color, are insensitive to. He no longer thinks of color, pines for it, grieves its loss. He has almost come to see his achromatopsia as a strange gift, one that has ushered him into a new state of sensibility and being. In this his transformation is exceedingly similar to that of John Hull, who, after two or three years of experiencing blindness as an affliction and curse, came to see it as “a dark, paradoxical gift”, a “concentrated human condition—one of the orders of human being.”

  Once, about three years after his injury, an intriguing suggestion was made (by Israel Rosenfield), that Mr. I. try to regain his color vision. Since the mechanism for comparing wavelengths was intact, and only V4 (or its equivalent) was damaged, it might be possible, at least in theory, Rosenfield thought, to “retrain” another part of the brain to perform the requisite Landian correlations, and thus to achieve some restoration of color vision. What was striking was Mr. I.’s response to this suggestion. In the first months after his injury, he said, he would have embraced such a suggestion, done everything possible to be “cured.” But now that he conceived the world in different terms, and again found it coherent and complete, he thought the suggestion unintelligible, and repugnant. Now that color had lost its former associations, its sense, he could no longer imagine what its restoration would be like. Its reintroduction would be grossly confusing, he thought, might force a welter of irrelevant sensations upon him, and disrupt the now-reestablished visual order of his world. He had been for a while in a sort of limbo; now he had settled—neurologically and psychologically—for the world of achromatopia.

  In terms of his painting, after a year or more of experiment and uncertainty, Mr. I. has moved into a strong and productive phase, as strong and productive as anything in his long artistic career. His black-and-white paintings are highly successful, and people comment on his creative renewal, the remarkable black-and-white “phase” he has moved into. Very few of them know that his latest phase is anything other than an expression of his artistic development, that it was brought about by a calamitous loss.

  Though it has been possible to define the primary damage in Mr. I.’s brain—the knocking out of an essential part of his color-constructing system—we are still totally ignorant of the “higher” changes in brain function that must have occurred in its train. Jonathan I. did not lose just his perception of color, but imagery, and even dreaming in color. Finally he seemed to lose even his memory of color, so that it ceased to be part of his mental knowledge, his mind.

  Thus, as more and more time elapsed without color vision, he came to resemble someone with an amnesia for color—or, indeed, someone who had never known it at all. But, at the same time, a revision was occurring, so that as his former color world and even the memory of it became fainter and died inside him, a whole new world of seeing, of imagination, of sensibility, was born. 33

  33. A similar emergence of new sensibilities and imagination is described in H.G. Wells’s great short story “The Country of the Blind”: “For fourteen generations these people have been blind and cut off from all the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and changed—Much of their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and fingertips.”

  There is no doubt of the reality of these changes—although it may have required a subject as gifted and as articulate as Jonathan I. to bring them out with such clarity. Neuroscience, at this point, can say nothing about the cerebral basis of such “higher” changes. The physiological investigation of color, thus far, has terminated in the color systems of early vision, the Landian correlations that occur in V1 and V4. But V4 is not an end point, it is only a way station, projecting in its turn to higher and higher levels—eventually to the hippocampus, so essential for the storage of memories; to the emotional centers of the limbic system and amygdala; and to many other parts of the cortex. The cessation of information flow from V4 to the memory systems of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, for example, might in part explain Mr. I.’s “forgetting” of
color. We do not have the tools at the moment to map the subtle, higher-level neural consequences of such a sensory loss, but a history such as Jonathan I.’s shows how crucial it is to do this.

  Work in the last decade has shown how plastic the cerebral cortex is, and how the cerebral “mapping” of body image, for example, may be drastically reorganized and revised, not only following injuries or immobilizations, but in consequence of the special use or disuse of individual parts. We know, for instance, that the constant use of one finger in reading Braille leads to a huge hypertrophy of that finger’s representation in the cortex. And with early deafness and the use of sign language, there may be drastic remappings in the brain, large areas of the auditory cortex being reallocated for visual processing. Similarly, it seemed, with Mr. I.: if entire systems of representation, of meaning, had been extinguished inside him, entirely new systems had been brought into being.

  On the ultimate question—the question of qualia: why a particular sensation may be perceived as red—the case of Jonathan I. may not be able to help us at all. After describing “the celebrated phaenomenon of colours”, Newton drew back from all speculation about sensation and would hazard no hypothesis as to “by what modes or action light produceth in our minds the phantasms of colours.” Three centuries later, we still have no hypothesis, and perhaps such questions can never be answered at all.

  2. The Last Hippie

  Such a long, long time to be gone—and a short time to be there.

  —Robert Hunter “Box of Rain”

  Greg F. grew up in the 1950s in a comfortable Queens household, an attractive and rather gifted boy who seemed destined, like his father, for a professional career—perhaps a career in songwriting, for which he showed a precocious talent. But he grew restive, started questioning things, as a teenager in the late sixties; started to hate the conventional life of his parents and neighbors and the cynical, bellicose administration of the country. His need to rebel, but equally to find an ideal and a guide, to find a leader, crystallized in the Summer of Love, in 1967. He would go to the Village and listen to Allen Ginsberg declaiming all night; he loved rock music, especially acid rock, and, above all, the Grateful Dead.

  Increasingly he fell out with his parents and teachers; he was truculent with the one, secretive with the other. In 1968, a time when Timothy Leary was urging American youth to “tune in, turn on, and drop out”, Greg grew his hair long and dropped out of school, where he had been a good student,—he left home and went to live in the Village, where he dropped acid and joined the East Village drug culture—searching, like others of his generation, for Utopia, for inner freedom, and for “higher consciousness.”

  But “turning on” did not satisfy Greg, who stood in need of a more codified doctrine and way of life. In 1969 he gravitated, as so many young acidheads did, to the Swami Bhaktivedanta and his International Society for Krishna Consciousness, on Second Avenue. And under his influence, Greg, like so many others, stopped taking acid, finding his religious exaltation a replacement for acid highs. (“The only radical remedy for dipsomania”, William James once said, “is religiomania.”) The philosophy, the fellowship, the chanting, the rituals, the austere and charismatic figure of the swami himself, came like a revelation to Greg, and he became, almost immediately, a passionate devotee and convert. 34

  34. The swami’s unusual views are presented, in summary form, in Easy Journey to Other Planets, by Tridandi Goswami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, published by the League of Devotees, Vrindaban (no date, one rupee). This slim manual, in its green paper cover, was handed out in vast quantities by the swami’s saffron-robed followers, and it became Greg’s bible at this stage.

  Now there was a center, a focus, to his life. In those first exalted weeks of his conversion, he wandered around the East Village, dressed in saffron robes, chanting the Hare Krishna mantras, and early in 1970, he took up residence in the main temple in Brooklyn. His parents objected at first, then went along with this. “Perhaps it will help him”, his father said, philosophically. “Perhaps—who knows?—this is the path he needs to follow.”

  Greg’s first year at the temple went well; he was obedient, ingenuous, devoted, and pious. He is a Holy One, said the swami, one of us. Early in 1971, now deeply committed, Greg was sent to the temple in New Orleans. His parents had seen him occasionally when he was in the Brooklyn temple, but now communication from him virtually ceased.

  One problem arose in Greg’s second year with the Krishnas—he complained that his vision was growing dim, but this was interpreted, by his swami and others, in a spiritual way: he was “an illuminate”, they told him; it was the “inner light” growing. Greg had worried at first about his eyesight, but was reassured by the swami’s spiritual explanation. His sight grew still dimmer, but he offered no further complaints. And indeed, he seemed to be becoming more spiritual by the day—an amazing new serenity had taken hold of him. He no longer showed his previous impatience or appetites, and he was sometimes found in a sort of daze, with a strange (some said “transcendental”) smile on his face. It is beatitude, said his swami—he is becoming a saint. The temple felt he needed to be protected at this stage: he no longer went out or did anything unaccompanied, and contact with the outside world was strongly discouraged.

  Although Greg’s parents did not have any direct communication from him, they did get occasional reports from the temple—reports filled, increasingly, with accounts of his “spiritual progress”, his “enlightenment”, accounts at once so vague and so out of character with the Greg they knew that, by degrees, they became alarmed. Once they wrote directly to the swami and received a soothing, reassuring reply.

  Three more years passed before Greg’s parents decided they had to see for themselves. His father was by then in poor health and feared that if he waited longer he might never see his “lost” son again. On hearing this, the temple finally permitted a visit from Greg’s parents. In 1975, then, not having seen him for four years, they visited their son in the temple in New Orleans.

  When they did so, they were filled with horror: their lean, hairy son had become fat and hairless; he wore a continual “stupid” smile on his face (this at least was his father’s word for it); he kept bursting into bits of song and verse and making “idiotic” comments, while showing little deep emotion of any kind (“like he was scooped out, hollow inside”, his father said); he had lost interest in everything current; he was disoriented—and he was totally blind. The temple, surprisingly, acceded to his leaving—perhaps even they felt now that his ascension had gone too far and had started to feel some disquiet about his state.

  Greg was admitted to the hospital, examined, and transferred to neurosurgery. Brain imaging had shown an enormous midline tumor, destroying the pituitary gland and the adjacent optic chiasm and tracts and extending on both sides into the frontal lobes. It also reached backward to the temporal lobes, and downward to the diencephalon, or forebrain. At surgery, the tumor was found to be benign, a meningioma—but it had swollen to the size of a small grapefruit or orange, and though the surgeons were able to remove it almost entirely, they could not undo the damage it had already done.

  Greg was now not only blind, but gravely disabled neurologically and mentally—a disaster that could have been prevented entirely had his first complaints of dimming vision been heeded, and had medical sense, and even common sense, been allowed to judge his state. Since, tragically, no recovery could be expected, or very little, Greg was admitted to Williamsbridge, a hospital for the chronically sick, a twenty-five-year-old boy for whom active life had come to an end, and for whom the prognosis was considered hopeless.

  I first met Greg in April 1977, when he arrived at Williamsbridge Hospital. Lacking facial hair, and childlike in manner, he seemed younger than his twenty-five years. He was fat, Buddha-like, with a vacant, bland face, his blind eyes roving at random in their orbits, while he sat motionless in his wheelchair. If he lacked spontaneity and initiated no exchanges, he responded promp
tly and appropriately when I spoke to him, though odd words would sometimes catch his fancy and give rise to associative tangents or snatches of song and rhyme. Between questions, if the time was not filled, there tended to be a deepening silence; though if this lasted for more than a minute, he might fall into Hare Krishna chants or a soft muttering of mantras. He was still, he said, “a total believer”, devoted to the group’s doctrines and aims.

  I could not get any consecutive history from him—he was not sure, for a start, why he was in the hospital and gave different reasons when I asked him about this; first he said, “Because I’m not intelligent”, later, “Because I took drugs in the past.” He knew he had been at the main Hare Krishna temple (“a big red house, 439 Henry Street, in Brooklyn”), but not that he had subsequently been at their temple in New Orleans. Nor did he remember that he started to have symptoms there—first and foremost a progressive loss of vision. Indeed he seemed unaware that he had any problems: that he was blind, that he was unable to walk steadily, that he was in any way ill.

  Unaware—and indifferent. He seemed bland, placid, emptied of all feeling—it was this unnatural serenity that his Krishna brethren had perceived, apparently, as “bliss, ” and indeed, at one point, Greg used the term himself. “How do you feel?” I returned to this again and again. “I feel blissful”, he replied at one point, “I am afraid of falling back into the material world.” At this point, when he was first in the hospital, many of his Hare Krishna friends would come to visit him; I often saw their saffron robes in the corridors. They would come to visit poor, blind, blank Greg and flock around him; they saw him as having achieved “detachment”, as an Enlightened One.

  Questioning him about current events and people, I found the depths of his disorientation and confusion. When I asked him who was the president, he said “Lyndon”, then, “the one who got shot.” I prompted, “Jimmy—”, and he said, “Jimi Hendrix”, and when I roared with laughter, he said maybe a musical White House would be a good idea. A few more questions convinced me that Greg had virtually no memory of events much past 1970, certainly no coherent, chronological memory of them. He seemed to have been left, marooned, in the sixties—his memory, his development, his inner life since then had come to a stop.