An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Oliver Sacks does cognitive science in the best sense. Away from neurons, and systems, and syndromes, and into the reality of perception, and different kinds of perception. From an artist who loses his color, to a man who regains his sight, he delves into altered perceptions to find out how the mind works to understand reality. The final half of the book is concerned with autism, and the profoundly strange and isolating world of the autistic. Some people, Temple Grandin in particular, have learned to function without any natural theory of mind, treating their time on Earth as a task of brute-force social pattern recognition, being an ‘anthropologist on Mars’