Even when seemingly glued to his New York clinic, Oliver Sacks has always made mental journeys, crossing over into others' psychological territory, coming back a changed man. "When I spent a lot of time with the deaf community I learned to speak sign language. I feel I underwent a sort of neurological change, in which I found meaning instantly being converted into gesture - I felt the language on my hand, which I'd never thought of before."
A new book of essays, released by Knopf on 15 January, The Island of the Colorblind finds the usually more sedentary Sacks wearing the hat of a travel writer. Sacks documents his journey to several Pacific islands, investigating, among other things, a group of Micronesian islanders, a high percentage of whom are born without color-sensing cells. These achromatics have compensated for the lack of color and diminished sight with highly developed senses of texture and movement. But, in these essays, Sacks looks further than the patients and becomes more sharp-tongued, taking time to describe the sometimes absurd, sometimes horrific effects of colonization.
"I think going to Micronesia was a piece of consciousness expansion," he told Wired News in a telephone interview. "I saw lots of things that made me furiously indignant - Spam, radiation, the military, certain missionaries. It hadn't hit me before."
His encounter with achromatism also seems to have left an impression of the disabled helping each other to cope, to learn, to advance. At the end of The Island of the Colorblind, Sacks concludes that it is perhaps the cyberspace of fax, phone, and Internet that provides the "island" community where the colorblind can support each other. Sacks says this is true for a wide range of people with sometimes severe disorders. "Using the Internet is a tremendously effective strategy. Knowing one isn't alone. This is helping people who had no chance of communicating at all, at least with any depth."
Asked about applying science to the task of expanding the senses, expanding communication, Sacks, typically, shifts the meaning to something larger. "I think music and art are acutely expansive of one's mind. Few of us are capable of writing a great piece of music, but most of us are capable of appreciating it. I think of art as an acute, sensuous, intellectual expander." When asked about more technological means, Sacks says, "Einstein said if we lose our sense of wonder we might as well be dead. I think whatever evokes that sense of wonder and mystery is worth exploring, whether it's drugs, religion, art, travel, swimming, or cycads."
