Reddit reviews An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

If you are curious about this, I would recommend reading Oliver Sacks' very interesting book An Anthropologist on Mars, specifically the chapter "To See or not to See". Sacks is a neurologist-turned-writer and describes interesting cases of mental disorders and damage. He writes about a man who lost his sight as a young child and had it restored as an adult. He is essentially unable to draw meaning from his sight, since his brain never fully developed or lost the ability to make sense of visual input. Sacks writes a lot about how the brain works to process information which I find fascinating.

We seem to be programmed in our culture - perhaps by western religious and philosophical traditions - to accept dualism, which is the notion that mind and body are separate. However, several centuries of scientific progress have demonstrated more or less incontrovertibly the material basis of consciousness, thought, emotion, memory, and personality.

You ARE your brain. That is all there is to it.

What is particularly fascinating is how individual parts of the brain can be altered (i.e. damaged) with the result that parts of you are altered.

Oliver Sacks has several fascinating books that discuss case studies of neurological deficit, written for a popular audience, and they are each wonderful. Here are two of them:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

http://www.amazon.com/Anthropologist-Mars-Seven-Paradoxical-Tales/dp/0679756973/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319305698&sr=1-1

Do not adapt anything. Write in your voice because more than the intellectual curiosity, there is the outsider's interest in experiencing you.

EDIT:

Take a look at some of the books by
Oliver Sacks. His book An anthropologist on Mars is a good start.

She was interviewed and had a great relationship with Oliver Sacks, the "Awakenings" psychiatrist. He wrote about her in a collection of studies called "An Anthropologist on Mars." Interesting book! https://www.amazon.com/Anthropologist-Mars-Seven-Paradoxical-Tales/dp/0679756973

Your description is pretty apt actually, a neurologist wrote a book called "An Anthropologist on Mars" where he writes about studies hes done of neurologically atypical people with bizarre circumstances (An artist who loses the ability to not only see color, but conceptualize color; a man suffering severe tourettes with physical ticks but is able to safely control a plane; etc). The title of the books is taken from interviews with a well-adjusted and successful sociopath. At one point she describes the act of acting normal, expressing common emotions without actually feeling them, as what it must be like for a normal person to be "An anthropologist on mars", studying a species of aliens and trying to live among them without having any understanding of how they actually think or the reasoning behind their actions.

She also only strove to act "good" because she literally thinks that god will murder her if she doesn't, so there's that.

Funny that you mention pilots because my dad had joined the Air Force and wanted to be a pilot, but was rejected because he was colorblind, despite the 20/15 vision. This was in the days before the military realized that certain types of colorblindness actually endow a person with the ability to not be fooled by camouflage. (I didn't inherit the colorblindness, either.)

As for peripheral vision, mine is apparently ridiculously good, to the point that, several times, when I've had that test from an optometrist or opthamologist, there's been an "Uh, are you sure?" moment. (Yes, I'm sure, I knew when I could see that white dot, thank you.)

Re: the Oliver Sacks story, that's from An Anthropologist on Mars. You're welcome.

There's a book called An Anthropologist on Mars that has a story about a professional painter who got in a car accident, had temporary amnesia, and became mono-chromatically colorblind as a result. He was so proficient, that he had memorized every pantone code. It's fascinating reading his descriptions of what he sees.

Not sure if this is the one kellehertexas is talking about, but Oliver Sacks wrote an interesting article in the New Yorker about this very subject. The article subsequently became the section titled "To See and Not See" in his excellent book "An Anthropologist on Mars."

Probably not what you're looking for right now, but if you should ever really want to know how someone with autism thinks, you might start with [Temple Grandin] (http://www.amazon.com/Temple-Grandin/e/B000AP9AQU/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1406078998&sr=1-2-ent). I think it's in [Thinking in Pictures] (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Pictures-Expanded-Autism-Vintage/dp/0307739589/ref=la_B000AP9AQU_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406079027&sr=1-3) that she describes so well how differently she perceives language and the world around her.

Oliver Sacks wrote about her in [An Anthropologist On Mars] (http://www.amazon.com/Anthropologist-Mars-Seven-Paradoxical-Tales/dp/0679756973/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406079467&sr=1-1&keywords=anthropologist+on+mars) -