Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology

"It really does. You think you’re getting a popular science book about people with neurological problems. Then he wanders into these flights of fancy and philosophy, the bizarre meanderings of his own mind in response to his patients rather than necessarily patient stories. It’s an incredibly original and beautifully written book. He says something that Sacks doesn’t say. If you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat , you’ll come to the end of a lot of those stories and not really know what was wrong with the person. Sacks describes their symptoms but he doesn’t necessarily tell you exactly what caused them or how they came about, probably because he doesn’t know and probably he doesn’t know because nobody knows. That’s what Broks says quite straightforwardly at one point in the book: neurologists and psychologists are working with something where we don’t know a fraction of the answers. We know a tiny amount about the organ we’re working with. Most people who work as experts in a field understand exactly what they’re doing. If they’re building an engine, they know what all the bits are. They know what will happen if they leave a bit out or if this breaks. Whereas we’re working with this organ that we don’t understand. When it goes wrong, it does so differently in everyone. It’s very strange to try to be an expert in something that you don’t remotely understand and I think that comes across in this book."