The Man Who Tasted Words: A Neurologist Explores the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses

Neurologist Leschziner (The Nocturnal Brain) takes a fascinating deep dive into the functions and malfunctions of the five senses in this sharp account. The human brain doesn’t have the capacity to “recreate our environment from scratch at every single moment,” he writes; instead, it attempts to come up with the most rational explanation for the inputs it receives from the senses. When any component of this intricate system is altered or stops working, a person can experience the disruption in several ways, including illusions, delusions, and hallucinations. Those effects are brilliantly illustrated with eye-opening case studies: some people never feel pain because of a genetic condition; others lose their visual memory after a stroke; and one woman experienced vivid hallucinations shortly after losing her vision (“I began to see zombie faces; still cartoonish, but scary all the same—blood dripping from their eyes, and gnarly teeth”). Leschziner makes a solid case that each sense is worthy of awe in its own way, but he tends to get bogged down in neurological terminology that lay readers may find hard to parse. Still, those who stick around will find this packed with insight. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management. (Feb.)