Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, a Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World

Description

Doctors have been able to cure some forms of congenital blindness and deafness for decades. But this has created another problem: most people end up hating their new senses. To ask someone to adapt to a new sense is to ask them to reshape their entire world. Many simply cannot. Every waking minute, they are bombarded by meaningless sights or sounds. Some sink into a depression so great that they lose their will to live and die. So then what to do with the cases of Liam McCoy and Zora Damji? Liam was born blind and Zora was born deaf. Both received surgeries to restore their senses as teenagers. Today, both lead healthy, independent lives. The question at the heart of Coming to Our Senses is: why? The answer reveals a common misunderstanding of how perception works. We tend to think of perception as a purely mechanical process, as a camera or microphone in the brain, recording the world objectively. But neurobiologist Susan Barry argues that your senses are completely your own. What you hear or see is influenced by your environment, history, age, relationships, preferences, fears, and needs. Your senses are so intimately connected to your experiences that they actually shape your personality. And as you grow, your senses grow with you, much further into adulthood than doctors once thought. The way you sense the world is part of what makes you, you. People like Liam and Zohra provide a clear view of how our sensory abilities intertwine with our personality, and Barry spent a decade with them, watching their process. Barry finds the environmental sources of Liam's exquisite sense of direction, as well his inability to learn to recognize even his own mother's face. And she considers how Zohra's world expands upon learning that sound allows you to observe things you can't see, as well as how the voice of Zohra's Aunt Najma influenced the kinds of voices Zohra can understand best. Ultimately, Liam and Zohra adapted to their new senses because their individual circumstances allowed them to do so, and in ways that reflect those circumstances. But there is no single answer to why some people adapt to their new senses while others do not, or for that matter, why two normally sighted people can see the same thing two different ways -- the answer depends upon the whole history and tenor of a person's life. Coming to Our Senses tells its stories with grace, empathy, and genuine curiosity. It is a testament to the power of resilience, and a moving account of how, regardless of how we're born, we must each find our own way.

Susan R. Barry is professor emeritus of biology and neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College, where she researched stereovision, plasticity, and coordination. She's written for and been covered by the New York Times, LA Times, Big Think, NPR's Morning Edition and Fresh Air, and elsewhere. You might know Barry as "Stereo Sue," a nickname bestowed by Oliver Sacks when he wrote about her for a New Yorker essay that was later anthologized in The Mind's Eye. She lives in Massachusetts.

"Coming to Our Senses is an engaging and illuminating book. Barry's intimate account of people who gained the ability to see and hear as adults offers rich insights into how we shape, and our shaped by, our senses. Along the way Barry teaches us much about vision, hearing and the human capacity to learn and adapt." --Dennis M. Levi, UC Berkeley "Barry, who spent over a decade getting to know these two incredible people, profiles them with detail and compassion, unraveling their stories through both personal and scientific lenses. The result is a book that reveals the ways in which scientific knowledge is profoundly tied to our understanding of human nature... Fascinating." --The Wesleyan Connection "Interweaving McCoy and Damji's accounts with scholarly investigations of how perception works, Barry celebrates her subjects' determination to adapt to their newfound senses."--Smithsonian Magazine Online "Coming to Our Senses, by neurobiologist Susan Barry, explains how our actions shape and reshape our senses throughout our lives, delving into this deeply personal developmental process."--New Scientist "In telling the detailed stories of how Liam and Zohra learned to navigate the world using their new senses -- stories that in many ways mimic the way able-bodied infants accomplish the same thing -- Barry gives us insight into what it means to be human."--New York Times "Neurobiologist Barry explores sight, hearing, and perception in this triumphant survey of people who gained a sense they were born without. Barry skillfully balances scientific explanations with empathetic stories of how senses shape the human experience... This powerful tale is as thoughtful as it is informative."--Publisher's Weekly "Through stories of two amazing individuals, a neurobiologist explains how we see and hear...Even science-savvy readers will find surprises in this insightful exploration of how two humans learned a new sense." --Kirkus "While researching the fascinating and inspiring story of a boy and a girl - born blind and deaf, respectively - who learned to see and hear after receiving surgical intervention, Barry, a neurobiologist who herself gained sight in both eyes in midlife, arrived at a new theory about the nature of perception."--Toronto Globe & Mail "Absolutely fascinating."--Temple Grandin "What would happen if you had a new sense grafted on your body? Sue Barry is alert to the many fascinating details of how Liam and Zohra navigated their new sensory experiences, essentially giving the reader a lab course in experimental philosophy. This moving work of biography and scholarship explores the deep questions that arise when people choose to live in bodies that have been made new and strange."--Michael Chorost, author of, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human