In an interview on the Art of Observation

Your next book is Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist On Mars, stories of people with different medical conditions who see things differently.

Really, all Sacks’s books are an inspiration to me in bringing together scientific and philosophical reflections on various human conditions. In all his books he uses case histories where something is going wrong neurologically. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat he talks about prosopagnosia, which is an inability to recognise a face, and then it turns out later in his life he actually has that condition himself. I find that kind of symmetry interesting.

In this book he has some fascinating stories, including a well-known one about Temple Grandin, who was the high-functioning autistic who wrote the book Thinking in Pictures. He describes her ability to ostensibly see the world of animals that are being led to a slaughterhouse in a way that other people, especially those who designed slaughterhouses, could not. That represents the idea of being able to see for someone else.

And her work on this led her to be able to make improvements for animals in slaughterhouses in terms of their experiences there.

Yes, she helped the animals not to be so fearful of approaching their death. There is something paradoxical in that, of course. But putting that aside, it is interesting to me that she was able to realise that something shiny, like light reflecting off a puddle or a swinging chain, might disturb or alarm an animal that has a visual sensitivity to that type of thing. Most people wouldn’t think of that because we just go about with our heads and eyes and experiences.

So this book explores some of the other different visions of the world there might be.

That’s right.