The man who tasted words A neurologist explores the strange and startling world of our senses

In this stimulating investigation of the human senses, neurologist Leschziner explains the various ways that senses deliver and the brain interprets an astounding amount of sensory data. Not surprisingly, the process can be prone to errors. By necessity, the brain must function as a sort of "prediction machine" filling in the gaps. Brief stories of people affected by altered senses (due to injury, seizure, genetic abnormality, or chance) are presented. Patients include a man who doesn't feel pain (and has incurred hundreds of broken bones), a female sommelier who loses her taste, a fellow whose hearing becomes mysteriously amplified, a woman with vision loss who "sees" hallucinations, and an individual who senses cold as hot and vice versa. Leschziner discussed synesthesia, a fusion of two or more senses, profiling, for example, a woman who perceives colors when listening to music. He also explores the connection between olfaction and emotional memory, everyday illusions, phantom-limb phenomenon, and even life's randomness. Leschziner's neuroscience inquiry raises the question of how we can know what is real when our senses are not always trustworthy.

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.)