Miriam’ s feet always feel burning hot. No matches in shoes involved. Alison’s feel for temperature is reversed. Dawn experiences massive pain in her face hundreds of times a day. Paul feels no pain. You might think this is a good thing, with obvious benefits. But the downsides can really hurt.

The book raised some philosophical issues, that even days after finishing the last chapter, I am still reflecting on. Reality, whatever your experience, is constructed by the brain. My reality is most likely different than your reality and the truth is not necessarily what we perceive it to be. Each case of sensory alteration reads like a detective story, with puzzling symptoms pieced together”

Table of Contents

A sommelier loses her sense of taste, making it a bit of a challenge to do her job. You will learn a lot about how flavor informs our lives, and how it is actually constructed. Abi can experience basic tastes, but not flavor, as she has never had a sense of smell. Leschziner riffs on the difference between the two, offering a very surprising (to me, anyway) conclusion about the latter. He also takes a broader view. While we tend to say there are five senses, he identifies a number of other perceptual paths that could be considered senses. Among others, he goes into proprioception, the perception of where the body is in space and where parts of it are in relation to each other. In The Man Who Tasted Words, consultant neurologist Guy Leschziner takes us on a journey through the senses, exploring how each one shapes our experience of the world. And investigating what happens when they deviate from the norm. Along the way we meet a number of extraordinary individuals and step through the looking glass and into their worlds. Worlds where hot and cold are reversed, where a person with no sight sees fantastical visions, or where words have a taste and sounds create sensations.

The book combines specific cases, generally the author's own, with related aspects of neurology. It also looks at some of the more general challenges he has faced in his career. Certainly one of his general points is how badly doctors communicate with their patients at times. Each chapter of this book leads the reader through a new sense and explores, through engaging storytelling, how the brain understands (or misunderstands) the world around us. Honestly, this book was amazing and I had a hard time putting it down. I highly recommend it, just make sure to clear your schedule as you won't want to stop reading! And if you thought the doctor would limit himself to our five senses, well, mostly, but not entirely. He does write a bit about other elements of our being that might be considered senses beyond the five. Generally, the book is about the doctor figuring out what is causing strange sensations for his patients. Case histories abound. Jadi teringat Max Tegmark dalam buku Our Mathematical Universe. Dia baru sadar setelah dewasa bahwa dia buta warna. "Pada saat itu saya baru sadar bahwa segala asumsi saya tentang realitas ternyata salah besar..." Dalam buku ini Leschziner bercerita tentang kasus-kasus medis yang berkaitan dengan syaraf. Tentang Paul yang tidak bisa merasakan sakit, Rahel yang kehilangan sensitivitas terhadap gerakan dan posisi tubuh (proprioception), mengakibatkan ia tidak mampu berdiri padahal otot-ototnya baik-baik saja.For all his professional expertise, the moments when Leschziner gets personal are where his warmth and empathy show There is a wonderful section on how smell impacts a wide range of human activities, including, but not limited to, the obvious ones about the edibility of food, and repulsiveness of rot, but how we make many social decisions based on an unconscious (mostly) reactions to personal odors. It certainly manifests in language. This look at olfaction passes the smell test, does not at all stink to high heaven, or smell fishy, and if called by any other name, it would smell as sweet. It is not to be sniffed at, or do you smell a rat? In The Man Who Tasted Words, neurologist Guy Leschziner leads readers through the five senses and how, through them, our brain understands or misunderstands the world around us. The Daily Mail - The bizarre condition that keeps a choir singing Land of Hope and Glory inside Bill Oddie's head: New book reveals what happens when our senses go haywire... including a woman who smelled rotting flesh for years, and another who felt scalded by cold water- an extract The author convinced me that we are duffers stumbling from one illusion to the next. However, while I was reading this, particularly the visual 'blind spot' that we all suffer from, I wondered if our brains have an inbuilt 'blind spot' that propels us to idiocy or mass delusion.

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.’ Seperti kisah gajah dan 7 orang buta, masing-masing orang buta menerjemahkan gajah secara berbeda, sesuai kapasitas pemahaman masing-masing, dan tidak ada satu pun yang bisa menangkap realitasnya secara utuh. The Man Who Tasted Words is an absolutely fascinating exploration of our senses. Neurologist Guy Leschziner expertly weaves his own experiences and observations with his patient's stories and uses clear easy-to-understand language, to explain complex medical conditions. In The Man Who Tasted Words, neurologist Guy Leschziner explores how the senses, and the neural circuits that underlie them, shape our view of the world. By introducing us to people with rare sensory capabilities such as Valeria, Leschziner highlights that there is no “normal” perception of reality because what we perceive as being “out there” in the world is entirely generated by activity in our brains.Randomness (like accidents, injuries), genetic mutations, auto-immune diseases, seizures, blindness, strokes, loss of taste, smell, illnesses, trauma-there is no end to causes that can disrupt our senses. How is the attention that we give to them an important factor? This is a provocative read, I was pondering the senses in a different light and learning much more about the brain and the circuitry of our nervous system than I imagined. What a mystery the human body is, despite all our scientific advances. I was engrossed by the patients, the journey each was on and all that they shared with the reader. Many people are unique and present a challenge to doctors. It is through studying these deviations from the ‘norm’ that understanding expands, hope is born that help is on the horizon for so many of us. An intelligently written book. 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.’ 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.

Mark hears his personal noises (chewing, breathing, and other) at way too high a volume, while the sounds of the external world are muffled. A TV personality has lost his ability to hear bird songs above a certain pitch, then starts hearing loud sounds everywhere, and a musical playlist that holds no appeal. There’s discussion on the connection between Alzheimer’s and hearing loss, the importance of doctor/patient communication especially in communicating bad news, the difference of how patients born with certain conditions handle it versus those who encounter the ‘loss’ later in life. Ranging beyond, Leschziner writes of a woman’s inability to construct internal visions, and of the phantom limb experience of many who have endured amputations. Our sense of ourselves in space gets a look as well, prompting you to wonder just what the criteria might be for defining what does and does not qualify a bodily experience to be called an actual sense. Similarly, the book could be an exegesis about a line from the Beatles' song "Strawberry Fields Forever": Nothing is real. Ternyata, dua buku dari ahli syaraf yang saya baca pada saat yang sama ini, meskipun bahasannya berbeda, tetapi menemukan pelajaran yang sama.The book title is inspired by James, another synaesthete, who associates words with flavours. In James’s world, a trip on the London Underground is an uncontrollable buffet of flavours. Holborn station tastes of burnt matches and Liverpool Street of liver and onions. We meet Alison, whose taste for trout while holidaying in Fiji led to a type of nervous system poisoning that reversed her sense of hot and cold. A sip of icy water now causes her lips to burn, while a warm shower feels freezing cold. Menarik sekali mengikuti penjelasan dari Dr. Leschziner mengenai bagaimana manusia menangkap sensasi-sensasi dari luar, dan bagaimana mereka diterjemahkan menjadi punya arti oleh otak. The Observer - Guy Leschziner: ‘Reality is entirely a construct of our nervous system’ by Andrew Anthony