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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. A common phrase in cognitive neuroscience is “perception is nothing more than controlled hallucination”. What exactly does that mean?
Overall, though, Leschziner provides a thought-provoking journey through the fundamental role our senses play in our experience of life and punctures the illusion that our window on the world is the unflinching truth. The fact that it is anything but only makes it more magical. A truly astonishing book – from the story of the man who tasted words to that of Paul who could pull out his own teeth and break his legs yet feel no pain. These are beautifully and engagingly written stories of how our senses tell us about the reality of the world – or, sometimes, don’t.’
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I would have said vision first, then hearing, then touch, then smell and then taste. By the end of writing the book, I’m not sure it changed significantly, but I certainly appreciated smell a lot more. It has far-reaching implications in terms of memory, in terms of emotion, in terms of lots of hidden aspects of our lives, for example, the attraction towards another individual. I think it’s much underappreciated that smell is a very important mode of communication. The issue of pain features prominently in your book. One of your subjects experiences no pain at all. Why do you think pain is quite so painful? Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.’ The information you receive from your senses makes up your world. But that world does not exist. What we perceive to be the absolute truth of the world around us is a complex reconstruction, a virtual reality created by the complex machinations of our minds in tandem with the wiring of our nervous systems. But what happens if that wiring goes awry? What happens if connections falter, or new and unexpected connections are made? Tiny shifts in the microbiology of our nervous systems can cause the world around us to shift and mutate, to become alien and unfamiliar. We know that pain has got many components to it. A major component is the sensory discretion that tells you where in the body that pain is. Another feature that everyone will be aware of is what is termed the affective component of pain. In addition to knowing that I’ve just hit my finger with a hammer, it’s that sort of overwhelming unpleasantness, that dread of pain. I think that that’s a very important evolutionary mechanism. Pain is a very strong driver to avoid damage to oneself. It’s much under appreciated that smell is a very important mode of communication
Book Genre: Adult, Biology, Brain, Health, Medical, Medicine, Neuroscience, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science
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Stories of people who experience the world differently show us what it means to be human. This is a deeply moving and powerful book, full of provocative ideas about human perception and the way we construct reality.’
The reason for Paul’s complete inability to feel pain is an extremely rare genetic condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, or CIP. Since the moment of his birth, he has never experienced feeling physical hurt – no headache, toothache, or any other ache. Bob reports that Christine, Paul’s mother, was aware of something odd about Paul right from the start. He remembers her saying, ‘Don’t you think it strange that he never cries?’ Bob just assumed that Paul was a happy baby. But one day, when Paul was about ten months old, he was lying on the floor, surrounded by cuddly toys, when Bob came in from work. Bob recalls: ‘Suddenly Christine jumped, because I was standing on Paul’s arm! I hadn’t realised because of all the toys all over the floor.’ Despite an adult standing on him, Paul still didn’t cry. Not a peep. If you had a spare billion pounds to spend on medical research, where – from a neurological perspective – would you like it to go? Studies in animals and humans show that multiple areas of the brain are involved in the perception of pain. There is not one single spot, no single area of the brain, where pain is ‘felt’. In fact, the underlying brain mechanisms of pain perception are more like a network rather than a single pathway. This network reflects our understanding of the different aspects of pain: the ability to identify where in the body pain is, termed the ‘sensory-discriminative’ component, and the emotional load, often referred to as the ‘affective’ component. Separate but interrelated.
In the time that you’ve been practising, what is the medical breakthrough that has had the greatest impact on your patients? When I was a medical student, it was said that neurology was the speciality with 1,001 diagnoses, but only one treatment. And that treatment was steroids. Whereas our understanding of immunology, in particular, has caused an explosion in terms of treatments that are available for some very serious conditions such as multiple sclerosis or other autoimmune conditions that cause devastating neurological damage. That is a huge step forward therapeutically.
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