Will Byrnes's Reviews > The Man Who Tasted Words: A Neurologist Explores the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses

…sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can influence the data being captured. This is referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively. But this two-way flow of information is not limited to sensation, or even our senses; it is a feature of how every tenet of our nervous system works.

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…when we listen, what we hear is the result of the process of making sense of these pressure waves all around us, ascribing meaning to these tremblings of molecules. It is an early warning system, an awareness of what lies in wait immediately beyond our bodies or outside our field of vision. It is also an effective mode of communication. As the authors of the textbook Auditory Neuroscience state, ‘Every time you talk to someone, you are effectively engaging in something that can only be described as telepathic activity, as you are effectively “beaming your thoughts into the other person’s head,” using as your medium a form of “invisible vibrations”.’

We tend to think of our senses as pure forms of data gathering. Physical sense encounters external stimuli and transfers that information directly to the brain, where the info is incorporated. Seems simple and direct, no? It might be were it actually the case. But it is most certainly NOT the case. We know for a fact that people believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of extant reality. January 6, 2021 and your crazy, Fox-addicted uncle offer prime examples of that. But it is also the case that believing is, literally, seeing, on a much more immediate, personal, sensate level, extending far beyond the willful ignorance of political (and reportorial) bubble-think.


Dr. Guy Leschziner - image from his Goodreads profile

Dr. Guy Leschziner, a consultant neurologist in the Departments of Neurology and Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals (where he runs the Sleep Disorders Centre) and at several other London institutions, presenter of several series for BBC on the brain and sleep, reports on a collection of people with unusual sensate experiences. (Sadly, none look anything like the amazing sense-connections of the characters on the fabulous TV series Sense8), If you were expecting an entire book on synesthesia, (which you might, given the somewhat misleading book title) you might have to feel that elsewhere. Yes, there is a bit of that in here, but mostly the book explores the interactions between our senses and our brains, and even considers the nature of reality as it is, versus how we might perceive it.

And if you thought the doctor would limit himself to our five senses, well, mostly, but not entirely. He does write a bit about other elements of our being that might be considered senses beyond the five. Generally, the book is about the doctor figuring out what is causing strange sensations for his patients. Case histories abound.

Mark hears his personal noises (chewing, breathing, and other) at way too high a volume, while the sounds of the external world are muffled. A TV personality has lost his ability to hear bird songs above a certain pitch, then starts hearing loud sounds everywhere, and a musical playlist that holds no appeal.

Abi can experience basic tastes, but not flavor, as she has never had a sense of smell. Leschziner riffs on the difference between the two, offering a very surprising (to me, anyway) conclusion about the latter.

There is a wonderful section on how smell impacts a wide range of human activities, including, but not limited to, the obvious ones about the edibility of food, and repulsiveness of rot, but how we make many social decisions based on an unconscious (mostly) reactions to personal odors. It certainly manifests in language. This look at olfaction passes the smell test, does not at all stink to high heaven, or smell fishy, and if called by any other name, it would smell as sweet. It is not to be sniffed at, or do you smell a rat?

A sommelier loses her sense of taste, making it a bit of a challenge to do her job. You will learn a lot about how flavor informs our lives, and how it is actually constructed.

Miriam’ s feet always feel burning hot. No matches in shoes involved. Alison’s feel for temperature is reversed. Dawn experiences massive pain in her face hundreds of times a day. Paul feels no pain. You might think this is a good thing, with obvious benefits. But the downsides can really hurt.

Synesthesia does put in an appearance. For James, sounds have taste and texture. Valerie sees color associated with sound. Sometimes colors do seem too loud, even to those of us with the usual sense experiences. Is this a case of synesthesia in language?

‘My favourite Tube station was Tottenham Court Road, because there’s so many lovely words in there. “Tottenham” produced the taste and texture of a sausage; “Court” was like an egg – a fried egg but not a runny fried egg: a lovely crispy fried egg. And “Road” was toast. So there you’ve got a pre-made breakfast. But further along the Central Line was one of the worst ones, that used to taste like an aerosol can – you know, the aftertaste you get from hairspray. That was Bond Street.’

It is the associations our sensate experiences have with our past, with our emotions with our thought processes, that give them value far beyond the immediate physical information they provide, whether one is a Proustian character recalling a large chunk of his past prompted by dipping a madeleine in a cup of tea, or one is a less literary sort, recalling a moment from early parenthood, prompted by the particular scents in the baby products section of a store.

not only is there an overlap between olfaction and emotion, but also olfaction and emotional memory. Those regions of the brain involved in olfaction and emotional processing also have a strong role in memory.

Ranging beyond, Leschziner writes of a woman’s inability to construct internal visions, and of the phantom limb experience of many who have endured amputations. Our sense of ourselves in space gets a look as well, prompting you to wonder just what the criteria might be for defining what does and does not qualify a bodily experience to be called an actual sense.

Leschziner has an engaging writing style and keeps the intel delivery at an accessible pop-science level, for the most part. On occasion, a bit too much technical jargon does find a way in, but just skip past when it does. There are occasional moments of humor, one actual LOL, for me, anyway. But this is not a significant feature of his writing.

This book is brain candy of the first order (another synesthetic bit of language. Once you get a taste for the stuff, examples do start to stand out.) Not only does Leschziner point out the ways in which what we consider normal, or at least typical, human sensation works, he shows how some senses work through intermediaries, while others get a direct-to-brain, no-TSA-line channel from input to processing. That was news to me. He also offers a discussion about how our brains function as biological time delays, in a way, gathering information to create a picture in the now based on data gathering of conditions in the immediate past, as our brains and senses have far too little bandwidth or supercomputer speed to gather and process all the incoming information in real time. There is another fascinating consideration of the actual nature of reality. It makes The Matrix seem a lot less fantastical.

‘Perception is nothing more than a controlled hallucination.’ This is a commonly used sentence in the world of cognitive neuroscience. Essentially, our brains work as guessing machines, interpreting what is coming in through our senses in the context of our model of the world. What we perceive relates to our existing beliefs about the world, to how what the information our senses provide us interacts with our virtual-reality simulation of the universe.

Very much worth a look or a listen, maybe a touch, if you read braille, The Man Who Tasted Words is a treat for your brain, and your senses, however they work.

the brain is not simply an absorber of information. It is a prediction machine. Our perception of the world is based upon predictions of how we expect our world to be, a necessary shortcut to deal with those three flaws, of data capacity, inherent delay and ambiguity.

Review posted – February 25, 2022

Publication date – February 22, 2022


I received an ARE of The Man Who Tasted Words from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. It smelled and tasted great.




This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Leschziner is a consultant neurologist in the Departments of Neurology and Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals (where he runs the Sleep Disorders Centre) and at several other London institutions. He has presented several series for BBC on the brain and sleep. The Man Who Tasted Words is his third book, the second intended for general readers.

Interviews
-----The Observer - Guy Leschziner: ‘Reality is entirely a construct of our nervous system’ by Andrew Anthony
-----Intelligence Squared - Exploring the Senses, with Guy Leschziner by Helen Czerski – audio – 47:59

Items of Interest from the author
-----BBC Radio - Mysteries of Sleep - Three lectures,, about a half hour each
-----BBC – The Compass - The Senses - audio – 26:29
-----The Daily Mail - The bizarre condition that keeps a choir singing Land of Hope and Glory inside Bill Oddie's head: New book reveals what happens when our senses go haywire... including a woman who smelled rotting flesh for years, and another who felt scalded by cold water- an extract
-----Owltail - 17 Podcast Episodes

Item of Interest
-----WebMD – on Synesthesia