Customer Reviews

The Man Who Tasted Shapes (Bradford Books)

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The Man Who Tasted Shapes is an extraordinary work of research into the human mind that was, to me, only superficially about synesthesia. The information and perspective shared are much bigger than the title would imply. I believe that you'll find it to be fabulously interesting, even if you have zero interest in synesthesia.

Most doctors are afraid to write what they truly believe in their hearts lest it be challenged and scorned by their peers. Rarely do scientists allow you to "see the man behind the curtain," preferring to hide instead behind that mysterious veil we called "objective data." In this, Dr. Cytowic is far braver than most, and certainly more honest.

Here is just such an example from the book: "My innate analytic personality had been reinforced by twenty years of training in science and medicine. I reflexively analyzed whatever passed my way and firmly believed that the intellect could conquer everything through reason. 'You need an antidote to your incessant intellectualizing,' Clark suggested, 'something to put you in touch with the irrational side of your mind.'... I had never considered that there might be more to the human mind than the rational part that I was familiar with. It had never once occurred to me that a force to balance rationality existed, let alone that it might be a normal part of the human psyche."

In another chapter, Cytowic asserts, "Not everything we are capable of knowing and doing is accessible to or expressible in language. This means that some of our personal knowledge is off limits even to our own inner thoughts. Perhaps this is why humans are so often at odds with themselves, because there is more going on in our minds than we can ever consciously know."

If you read a lot of medical texts, as I do, you will find Dr. Cytowic to be far more broadminded and much less linear in his thinking than his peers. This makes Cytowic interesting, instead of boring like the others.

One final quote: "Neuroscientists have just lately come to realize how important emotion is. Placing reason and the (intellectual) cortex first and foremost is like the Wizard of Oz shouting, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." Reason, and an accomplice called self-awareness have deluded us into believing that they have been pulling the strings, but emotion and mentation not normally accessible to self-awareness have been in charge all along."

The Man Who Tasted Shapes is a delightful bridge between the hard science of neurology and the mystery that is man.

Buy the book. You won't regret it.

While Dr. Cytowic's book mainly deals with his investigation of the rare neurological phenomena called "synesthesia", his resulting insights on emotions, reasoning and consciousness are really what make this book worth reading. He presents "The New View of How the Brain Works". A view that helps us understand the critical interaction of emotions and reasoning. If you are open-minded and ready to give an alternate point of view a chance, you will find this book to be truly enlightening, absorbing, thought provoking and enjoyable. If you are close-minded and think that science already has all the right answers - don't waste your time - try science fiction instead!

Originally published in 1993, this book is a popularization of Dr. Cytowic's more detailed 1989 book Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses. At the time it was published, it was of some value in bringing the topic of synesthesia to greater attention among both scholars and the general public. Dr. Cytowic thus gets an A for public education efforts, but a failing grade for accomplishment.

The book suffers from an unwarrantedly grandiose and revelatory style, and an amateurish presentation of the psychological side of the topic. Now, ten years later, many articles and books on synesthesia have come out. None of them corroborate the limbic theory of synesthesia Dr. Cytowic presents, nor do they echo his interpretation of synesthesia as an example of emotion taking precedence over reason. For the most part, this new literature offers a much better place to start understanding synesthesia than this book.

In the revised (2002) edition of Cytowic's other book Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, he goes some way towards taking account of these new developments; this new edition is worthwhile, but should definitely be balanced with other books on synesthesia. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, however, is no longer worth much attention.

This is an entertaining and easy read on an interesting subject by a neurologist who is an expert on it. If you are interested in synesthesia primarily as a "bizarre" or sensationalistic manifestation of human talents, Luria's amazing The Mind of a Mnemonist is your best bet; but if you want a light account of how a modern scientist goes about understanding this phenomenon and locating it in the emotional brain, read this book too. The author goes on to discuss the limbic system as the most important part of the brain (for an excellent recent discussion of the centrality of emotion, see Why We Feel by Victor S. Johnson), but he seems to become a bit unhinged in pursuing the consequences of this idea: the divigations and essays thereon that make up at least a third of the book, concerning subjects like the anthropic principle, altered states of consciousness, and spirituality, strike me as largely sophomoric verging on too painful to read. If you can stomach arguments like the one that "all life forms, but particularly brains, play a large role in slowing down the rate of entropy increase and the degradation of energy in the universe. Such profound possibilities suggest that we should direct our efforts not toward controlling our emotions but toward gaining better insight into them..." then you will have no problem. Perhaps we should applaud the author for being willing to expose himself by taking such risks; he does, after all, modestly label his formal essays as mere "trials" or "attempts." Cytowic likewise very openly includes a lot of biographical material, reconstructed conversations, randomn personal observations and opinions, etc., and you may or may not like the narrator who emerges; I myself have mixed feelings. It's hard not to like a guy who criticizes the dehumanizing aspects of the typical medical education and the kind of doctors who emerge from it. Finally, I have to say that I was occasionally annoyed by solecisms and infelicities of expression, at least in the original hardbound version.

This book helped clear up alot of things I've been wondering about, AND help me prove to those who doubted me that Synesthesia is a real thing. I've given up trying to explain what my Synesthesia's like, so I've opted to let them borrow the book. It explaines so many things, and has examples to help 'flesh' out the story. My psychology kids absolutely loved it!

I eagerly snatched this book off the shelf when I learned of it -- synesthesia is a fascinating subject with too few works devoted to it -- but Dr. Cytowic's tendency to climb onto his soap box took much of the potential pleasure out of "The Man Who Tasted Shapes". We are given details about only two people with the condition, and one of those only glancingly. The rest of the book is either written in coy dialogue form (taking scores of pages to relate an incident easily expressed in a paragraph -- padding, anyone?) or else denouncing other scientists' viewpoints. This is no "Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" [by Oliver Sacks], as the title seems to imply. I was left hungering to know more about the actual subject: synesthesia. I did not necessarily disagree with Dr. Cytowic's views, but they seemed to have pre-empted another book already in progress.

Janet Coleman Sides

Overview and Overall Opinion

This review will inform potential readers of the topics covered in The Man Who Tasted Shapes, while providing a critique and personal opinion regarding the efficacy and general style of writing exhibited by the author, Richard E. Cytowic. Although the book presents interesting ideas and awakens great interest in the subject of synesthesia, Cytowic's pretentious prose and somewhat contrived recollections often overshadow his apparent fascination with the topic.

Introduction, Style, and Structure

In The Man Who Tasted Shapes, neurologist Richard E. Cytowic presents the reader with an in depth report of his quest to solve the mystery of synesthesia and provide the medical underpinnings that might explain the underlying rationale behind the rare phenomenon. Cytowic accomplishes this through a conversational style and a chapter structure that clearly identifies important points for the reader to understand.

Overview and Critique of Part One

The novel is divided into two parts, with the first section being the most pertinent to the subject of the book, synesthesia, and also comprising the majority of the text. Synesthesia, literally "feeling together," is confusion between senses, in which perception through a particular sensation leads to an associated response in another sense. It is in Part One of the book, which Cytowic gleefully dubs his "medical mystery tale," where the reader is plunged into the realm of science and medicine as it pertains to synesthesia. After introducing the experiences of synesthete Michael Watson, the instigating factor behind the author's obsession, Cytowic explores his personal background and his experiences as a medical student. These chapters introduce the reader to Cytowic's distaste for technology and the method in which medical doctors are taught to diagnose and treat in today's society. For example, he states that "patients have been reduced to objects, and physicians to dispassionate feeders of the machines" (p. 38). He continually revisits these thoughts throughout the novel to the point at which I felt as though he was forcing his ideas upon me. In the middle of this extensive and unnecessary digression, Cytowic provides a succinct description of the outdated "standard view" of the brain as linearly functioning mental processes that are localized in various regions and supremely governed by the cortex. I felt relieved when Cytowic took a hiatus from this more technical writing and provided an in depth history of synesthesia, citing famous writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, composers, and other artists who experienced the phenomenon.

Despite Cytowic's somewhat wooden writing style, in the middle and latter portion of Part One he is able to engagingly convey his experimental process and study of synesthesia. Cytowic pinpoints the source of synesthetic experiences as occurring at a "low to intermediate [mental] level" within brain processes, indicating that sensational associations in synesthetes are without meaning and "the link [between them] is mostly invariant" (p. 108). In perhaps his most intriguing chapter, Cytowic compares synesthesia to certain altered mental states, including LSD induced synesthesia and temporal lobe epilepsy. He then uses this information to hypothesize that the limbic system within the brain, specifically the hypothalamus, is the location responsible for synesthesia. He further purports that the limbic system is the highest processing center within the brain, as it is responsible for emotion, and insists that "it is emotion, much more than reason, that makes us human" (p. 156).

Throughout this first section Cytowic also provides anecdotal stories to connect his philosophical and medical proposals to more immediately relatable concepts. He provides firsthand accounts of two synesthetes, Michael and Victoria, who also happen to be the subjects in his experiment to identify the diagnostic criteria for and types of synesthesia. In depth descriptions of Michael, who experiences sensations of touch when he tastes food, are particularly captivating and draw the reader further into the novel. I felt that if Cytowic had included additional case studies like that of Michael, the novel would have been more successful in both conveying different aspects of synesthesia and maintaining my interest throughout its entirety. However, periodically, dialogue spoken by other people in the novel seemed to be spoken in the same style as if it was Cytowic himself. This leads me to seriously doubt either the accuracy with which he recalled his conversations or his journalistic integrity.

The most obvious problem within this first section of the book was Cytowic's repetition of facts and information. At times it seemed as though he forgot what he had previously stated in other chapters, and, using almost the exact same wording, replicated definitions of concepts. In effect, Cytowic either intentionally or unintentionally made me feel as though I were not smart enough to grasp what he was explaining. Furthermore, his constant separation of key words into their Greek or Latin roots became tiresome and overused as the novel progressed.

Overview and Critique of Part Two

The final section of the book, Part Two, is composed of a short collection of essays written by Cytowic in which he applies his conclusion regarding synesthesia, the limbic system, and emotion to opinionated philosophical thoughts on human consciousness and artificial intelligence. I felt as though this section was entirely unnecessary and distinctly off topic from the major focus of the novel. These brief chapters only brought to mind Cytowic's previous divergence into his disapproval of technology (which he returns to here), and again I found myself wanting to read something other than his musings and opinions, which seemed trite and somewhat obvious.

Summary

In summary, I felt as though The Man Who Tasted Shapes effectively covered the interesting subject of synesthesia and provided a fascinating study of the medical explanation behind the phenomenon. However, the author's writing style tended to detract from the overall impact of the book, and several of his chosen topics of discussion seemed out of place and forcefully opinionated. I recommend this novel to readers who are particularly interested in synesthesia or those who are looking to discover a unique neurological occurrence.

Dr. Richard Cytowic is an example of the compassionate physician that I would want to interact with me should I ever require the expert opinion of a Neurologist. His book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, is a book for both the lay person and the health care professional which covers the condition called Synasthesia. Dr. Cytowic not only thoroughly describes the symptoms of Synasthesia, but he also brings to our attention the indiviual distress that can be actualized in an individual that has Synasthesia but who goes to a physician who is not well versed in this disorder. These individuals have often been put on anti-psychotic medications and thought themselves to be mentally disturbed when indeed this was not the case. Thank you Dr. Cytowic for a marvelous book which I read when it was first released. I am glad to see that it has been reissued and I have recommended it whole heartedly to associates and friends.

I love this book. If you've ever noticed that some of your senses mingle - for instance, a food tastes jagged or sharp (and I don't mean something you could photograph), or sounds produce movement and shape and color in your mind's eye - then you will find much to fascinate you in these pages. I suspect that highly creative people have a greater degree of synesthesia than average, because it allows their perceptions to cross-reference and produce new possibilities and insights.

One thing is clear upon reading this book: Richard Cytowic, M.D., is no Oliver Sacks. Though, as will be seen, there is much in here to recommend itself, his stilted reproduction of conversations which or may not have taken place and his `Creative Fiction 100' characterizations (i.e., Dr. Wood's continual inhalation of smoke or food) strike the experienced reader as painfully contrived, as though Cytowic were doing his level best to imitate Sacks and reach that always-elusive `wider audience'.

On the other hand, as Cytowic describes his quest to make sense of his friend's synesthesia (the man for whom gustatory sensations were experienced as the contours, edges, textures, and surface temperatures of external objects), the reader is also drawn into the mystery. One sense experienced as another simply does not compute in our Newtonian each-thing-in-its-place universe. Along with Cytowic, the reader is made to wonder, `How can this be?' Cytowic picks up clues along the way until he is led to `seeing the primacy of emotion over reason; the impossibility of a purely "objective" point of view; the force of intuitive knowledge; and why affirming personal experience yields a more satisfying understanding than analyzing what something "means" ' (7).

Cytowic moves through the years inexorably but somewhat leisurely after these answers. At last, with the help of a thick caseload of personal testimonies and controlled tests, he narrows down the subjective nature of the experience enough to declare his conclusion that `synesthesia is actually a normal brain function in every one of us, but that its workings reach conscious awareness in only a handful' (166, italics in original text). Cytowic `sees' (and perhaps smells, tastes, and hears!) synesthetes as `cognitive fossils' (167) who still experience the senses united as did our mammalian forebears. For the rest of us, this continuing brain process has become unconscious. The key, for Cytowic is emotion which `seems to reside at the interface between that part of our self which is accessible to awareness and that part which is not' (167).

It is when he examines the neurological evidence that his hypotheses are borne out. The climax of the detective work is reached when he gets his friend inside a regional cerebral blood flow scanner (CBF) where, with the help of a technical expert and doses of amyl nitrate (to accentuate his friend's synesthesia), he is shocked to discover that as his friend experienced the deep pleasure of synesthesia in the machine his cerebral cortex appeared to shut down almost entirely. Simultaneously, his limbic system and hippocampal areas became riotously active. Against the linear `standard view' of the brain, Cytowic announces that the limbic system has evolved in humans alongside the cortical system and has integrated itself into every area of the nervous system. In short, `the limbic system forms an emotional core of the human nervous system' (157). Thus, emotion `was no longer localized in a discrete control center but was spread out over pathways' (158). With this evidence, Cytowic concludes that even the nature of perceptions is largely determined by emotional valences and that such emotional elision of value is precisely what occurs in synesthesia. The emotional mind (as opposed to the logical, cognitive one) is the basis of human action and experience, according to Cytowic.

This is an important conclusion, if not all that original. What this means to consciousness studies and to the understanding of human life in general, Cytowic is not the slightest bit hesitant to tell us. In fact, such speculation appears to be the raison d'ętre of this user-friendly text and is the content of Part Two, `Essays on the Primacy of Emotion'. Unlike another, more `scientific', review of this book which I previously encountered, I quite disagree that these essays are `irrelevant' to his research. Anyone who has worked so prodigiously in one area of study and comes to such startling conclusions has earned the right to ruminate on what it all implies. Cytowic reveals himself as a stimulating essayist, but, in the end, he proves to be not much better a philosopher than a literary artist.

Cytowic usually seems to consider our `emotional mind' as non-conscious and this is a pivotal, if controversial, point. This implies our emotions are not subject to conscious volition and may explain why he feels the source of emotions to be somewhat mystical. He indicates that emotional valuation is necessary for any sort of mental consciousness to develop. He also shows that as learned adaptations become habit, both emotional charge and self-awareness decline or even disappear so behavior continues mechanically along. Cytowic calls upon the experimental literature on divided brains, the `readiness potential', and neurological conditions such prosopagnosia (wherein patients cannot recognize familiar faces but their galvanic skin resistance reveals definite physiological responses to those same faces) to demonstrate the primacy of the emotional mind - usually the right cerebral hemisphere. These examples clearly reveal a mode of experiencing which is not conscious, if we are to trust the first-person reports of the subjects. `Our conscious self is the tip of an iceberg' (170), Cytowic asserts. He adds that `recognition can be dissociated from conscious awareness of it' (212). The basis of our knowing is `unconscious knowledge' and the basis of our perception is `subception' (214). Here, Cytowic's case for the primacy of emotions sounds more like it supports the Freudian, the Jungian, or even the Darwinian unconscious rather than indicating any sort of transcendent spirituality.

The major problem of his essays is this: He makes an unwarranted leap from the primacy of the emotions into the strong anthropic principle and panpsychism, clearly revealing his bias for `spiritual' explanations of human existence. He claims that terms like `faith', `God', and `spirituality' are non-concepts which refer to ineffable experience. How emotional primacy indicates anything more than our ongoing connection with evolutionary processes escapes me entirely, as does the suggestion of concepts which are non-concepts. The terms he uses clearly are concepts, as rife with assumption and allusion as ever. Apparently by revealing the inefficaciousness of conscious intentionality, he feels he has simultaneously revealed our intuitive spiritual connection with all that is. This spiritual source is not self-evident.

Still, one may quibble too much. Cytowic goes to bat for emotions most effectively and his conclusions ring true that `consciousness, language, and higher mental functions [are] the consequences of our ability to express emotion. Emotion is fundamental to mind and what we call consciousness' (196). Our emotional core is understood by most of us to be basically part of our organic heritage which can be altered by continued conscious experience. His `faith', however, seems to pre-empt his seeing that our `consciousness, language, and higher mental functions' almost certainly return the favour and affect our emotions in their turn. The brain works in cycles of mutual effect and affect. Indeed, many persons as they age and learn may well succeed in uniting the two `minds' and creating conscious emotionality, i.e., they `get in touch with their feelings'. This understanding of the potential of higher mental functions to change emotions (as well as being changed by them) may well help to explain why non-rational believers like Cytowic feel their emotions indicate a doorway to the infinite and eternal. It is worth considering that their cultural belief-system has predisposed them to values which generate, in turn, appropriate emotional resonance.