Oliver Sacks on Ripe Bananas

(light music) - I had had a sort of haunting memory of an H.G.

Wells story called The Country of the Blind, in which a lost traveler in South America blunders into an isolated mountain valley and finds a whole community of blind people, people who have been blind for three centuries and who have lost the very concept of sight and light, and who in fact regard him as demented or hallucinated and having peculiar ideas produced by these pathologies of the face, which he calls eyes.

- Doctor Oliver Sacks is a pioneer of charting the landscape of the mind.

Neurologist, anthropologist, best selling author, Sacks has reshaped our understanding of the brain's resilience and adaptive powers.

- I'm very interested in how people adapt to extremes, to the neurological extremes imposed by an illness, but sometimes, say to other extremes.

I've been fascinated by total color blindness, or achromatopsia, in which the person only sees, if you want, in shades of black and white or shades of gray, that there existed people who had never seen color and had no concept of color.

Islands and mountain valleys, isolated places tend to concentrate rare genetic disorders, and so I thought possibly there is a valley of the colorblind, an island.

In '93, I went along to Guam.

On some impulse, I asked my colleague whether he knew of any islands of the colorblind, and to my astonishment, he said, "Yes there is one."

He said, "The little island of Pingelap, where a tenth of the population have it, and a third of the population are carriers of the genetic defect which gives rise to it."

I felt I had to go.

In the H.G.

Wells story, the traveler regards himself as the norm and a superior, and, in fact, he finds that the people in the village are so well-adapted to their condition that he is the one who blunders and makes mistakes and is regarded as abnormal, and I certainly sometimes had the feeling that the achromatopes felt that we, so-called normals, wasted a lot of time talking about color, referring to color, paying attention to something which for them was non-existent, which they can only imagine as trivial.

(light music) I think the tables were turned a little bit.

There was a little episode which occurred within minutes of us arriving on the island when we were rather, perhaps, contemptuously said, "How can you folk tell when a banana's ripe?

You can't distinguish green from yellow."

The answer was to bring us a banana, which was a bright green banana, as it happened, and we felt this was an immediate illustration of the helplessness and the hopelessness until we tried the banana, and it was perfectly ripe, and they said, "You see, you would've called this unripe because you went by color.

We went by texture, smell, feel, knowledge."

They said, "You're narrow minded.

You just used color as a criterion.

We used everything."

- [Henry] I guess the message that's sort of coming through in this discussion here is that we do stigmatize people.

People do have various problems that put them in insolation with others, but that as soon as there is a community that seems to form around these issues, that the rules start to change.

- Yes, I think there is a sort of critical level, so that if a tenth or a quarter of the population have some condition, it has to be accepted as a legitimate form of life and won't be marginalized, and sometimes, won't even be noticed.

(light piano music) - [Henry] Another thing that I read about was quite interesting, you went to a convention of people with Tourette's Syndrome?

- [Oliver] Oh, I think another experience which was also with one of these conventions, which took place in a sort of Tourettic hotel, I say a Tourettic hotel because the owner of the hotel and his daughter had Tourette's, so it was a lot of understanding and liberty given to people with Tourette's, and when I went back to my room in the evening, I heard sort of little howls and knockings and strange noises all around me, and I could be alone in a desert, and I wouldn't do this, but somehow, with everyone else doing it around me, suddenly I felt I could do the same, and I sort of joined them and yelled and screamed and banged without really just in a state of license, although I think it did have a certain effect, an emotional catharsis.

(light piano music) - [Henry] The attention that you've received because your Awakenings book and then the film that was based on your book, what about that attention that you've received?

- [Oliver] I think I was already, so to speak, well into middle age before it happened, and so I think I probably remained essentially the same sort of rather inquisitive and shy and stubborn person, but all sorts of things come my way now, and I have a sort of freedom to follow them, so that if I hear of an island of the colorblind or whatever, I can then take off some time and go there.

On the other hand, I feel frightened by the responsibility.

I think I have to measure my words carefully.

I don't know what sort of resonances or influence they may have, and occasionally, everything gets too much for me, and that I do what I've just done, which is I take off for another island.

I've just come back from Curacao.

There I did nothing but swim and dive and sort of completely forgot patients and neurology and everything else.

(light piano music) Subtitles by the Amara.org community