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- I had had a sort of haunting memory
of an H.G. Wells story called The Country of the Blind,
in which a lost traveler in South America
blunders into an isolated mountain valley
and finds a whole community of blind people,
people who have been blind for three centuries
and who have lost the very concept of sight and light,
and who in fact regard him as demented or hallucinated
and having peculiar ideas produced by these pathologies
of the face, which he calls eyes.
- Doctor Oliver Sacks is a pioneer
of charting the landscape of the mind.
Neurologist, anthropologist, best selling author,
Sacks has reshaped our understanding
of the brain's resilience and adaptive powers.
- I'm very interested in how people adapt to extremes,
to the neurological extremes imposed by an illness,
but sometimes, say to other extremes.
I've been fascinated by total color blindness,
or achromatopsia, in which the person
only sees, if you want, in shades of black and white
or shades of gray, that there existed people
who had never seen color and had no concept of color.
Islands and mountain valleys, isolated places
tend to concentrate rare genetic disorders,
and so I thought possibly there is a valley
of the colorblind, an island.
In '93, I went along to Guam.
On some impulse, I asked my colleague
whether he knew of any islands of the colorblind,
and to my astonishment, he said,
"Yes there is one."
He said, "The little island of Pingelap,
where a tenth of the population have it,
and a third of the population are carriers
of the genetic defect which gives rise to it."
I felt I had to go.
In the H.G. Wells story,
the traveler regards himself as the norm
and a superior, and, in fact,
he finds that the people in the village
are so well-adapted to their condition
that he is the one who blunders and makes mistakes
and is regarded as abnormal,
and I certainly sometimes had the feeling
that the achromatopes felt that we, so-called normals,
wasted a lot of time talking about color,
referring to color, paying attention to something
which for them was non-existent,
which they can only imagine as trivial.
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I think the tables were turned a little bit.
There was a little episode which occurred within minutes
of us arriving on the island
when we were rather, perhaps, contemptuously said,
"How can you folk tell when a banana's ripe?
You can't distinguish green from yellow."
The answer was to bring us a banana,
which was a bright green banana,
as it happened, and we felt
this was an immediate illustration
of the helplessness and the hopelessness
until we tried the banana, and it was perfectly ripe,
and they said, "You see, you would've called this unripe
because you went by color.
We went by texture, smell, feel, knowledge."
They said, "You're narrow minded.
You just used color as a criterion.
We used everything."
- [Henry] I guess the message that's sort of coming through
in this discussion here is that we do stigmatize people.
People do have various problems that put them in insolation
with others, but that as soon as there is a community
that seems to form around these issues,
that the rules start to change.
- Yes, I think there is a sort of critical level,
so that if a tenth or a quarter of the population
have some condition, it has to be accepted
as a legitimate form of life
and won't be marginalized, and sometimes,
won't even be noticed.
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- [Henry] Another thing that I read about
was quite interesting, you went to a convention
of people with Tourette's Syndrome?
- [Oliver] Oh, I think another experience
which was also with one of these conventions,
which took place in a sort of Tourettic hotel,
I say a Tourettic hotel because the owner of the hotel
and his daughter had Tourette's,
so it was a lot of understanding and liberty
given to people with Tourette's,
and when I went back to my room in the evening,
I heard sort of little howls and knockings
and strange noises all around me,
and I could be alone in a desert,
and I wouldn't do this, but somehow,
with everyone else doing it around me,
suddenly I felt I could do the same,
and I sort of joined them and yelled and screamed and banged
without really just in a state of license,
although I think it did have a certain effect,
an emotional catharsis.
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- [Henry] The attention that you've received
because your Awakenings book
and then the film that was based on your book,
what about that attention that you've received?
- [Oliver] I think I was already, so to speak,
well into middle age before it happened,
and so I think I probably remained essentially the same
sort of rather inquisitive and shy and stubborn person,
but all sorts of things come my way now,
and I have a sort of freedom to follow them,
so that if I hear of an island of the colorblind
or whatever, I can then take off some time
and go there.
On the other hand, I feel frightened
by the responsibility.
I think I have to measure my words carefully.
I don't know what sort of resonances or influence
they may have, and occasionally,
everything gets too much for me,
and that I do what I've just done,
which is I take off for another island.
I've just come back from Curacao.
There I did nothing but swim and dive
and sort of completely forgot patients and neurology
and everything else.
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