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. The title of your book refers to a man with synaesthesia, in which one sense triggers another. He can taste words, while someone else sees colours in music. What does this tell us about our sensory system?

Throughout the book, Leschziner makes it clear that every person’s reality is as valid as the next. There are, however, moments where he seemingly assumes that the reader experiences all five senses – and in the “normal” way. At other points, there is unnecessary repetition, which detracts from the message he is trying to get across. 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. A fascinating exploration of how our senses can enrich our experience of the world around us – and how they can work against us 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.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. But pain also has an emotional component – that gut-wrenching unpleasantness, that fear – that is a potent driver of learning to avoid it. Without the emotional baggage that accompanies that sensation of hurt, we would be less inclined to learn from our mistakes, to develop strategies to prevent repeat incidents. The risks would be too great, our lives curtailed, the survival of our species jeopardised. In fact, our brains are evidence of the significance of the emotional aspects of pain to our evolution. The areas of the brain involved in this aspect of our experience of pain are in the oldest evolutionary parts of our brains, structures that developed millions of years ago in the evolutionary pathway of animals, preserved in perpetuity, the signature of the utility of pain. Information about where the pain is coming from is relayed to the area of the brain involved in all aspects of touch – the sensory cortex. This strip of brain tissue is the location of the homunculus, the brain’s sensory map of the body. When represented in a diagram or model, it shows a grossly distorted figure with overblown lips, tongue, hands and feet, where the density of our sensation receptors is highest and the requirement to discriminate the precise location of any touch is most pronounced. Simultaneously, this information about pain is relayed to even more evolutionarily ancient areas of the brain – those responsible for our emotions and drives; regions of the brain that encode our primitive needs – beneficial ones such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire – and those that are aversive – such as fear, danger and, importantly, pain. And it is here, in the limbic system, the emotional nexus of the brain that resides in the central depths, that the affective component of pain is processed. 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. 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."

Sodium channels exist in a variety of forms, each with subtly different properties and each residing in different concentrations in various parts of the body. Some channels, rather than opening in response to changes in electrical state, are triggered by chemical transmitters, such as those responsible for muscle contraction. In this case, the electrical impulse travelling down the nerve cell causes the nerve endings to release a chemical called acetylcholine. Sodium channels in the muscle fibres sense the acetylcholine and open up, triggering a wholesale chemical response that results in movement. However, it is the sodium channels that are triggered by changes in electrical state that are primarily responsible for the sending of electrical impulses along our nerves. Each case of sensory alteration reads like a detective story, with puzzling symptoms pieced together”

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If you had a spare billion pounds to spend on medical research, where – from a neurological perspective – would you like it to go? Featuring interviews with patients and experts in the field, this book will change the way we view the power of our senses and their role in our way of being. 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. Wannerton’s ability made reading and studying for school difficult, but writing gave him an opportunity to choose words and tastes. Greenwood reports: Once, when he was working as a reporter, he spent all night on a 900-word sports story about Northern Irish footballer George Best, choosing the words so that the introduction consisted of hors d'oeuvres tastes, the middle of main courses like roast beef, and the conclusion of dessert. “It was really good fun,” he says. “But the thing that put me off journalism was that the subeditors would swap words.”