Coming to Our Senses, Susan R. Barry
Coming to Our Senses, Susan R. Barry
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Coming to Our Senses
A Boy Who Learned to See, a Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World

Author: Susan R. Barry

Narrator: Rengin Altay

Unabridged: 6 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 06/08/2021

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

A neurobiologist reexamines the personal nature of perception in this groundbreaking guide to a new model for our senses.
 We think of perception as a passive, mechanical process, as if our eyes are cameras and our ears microphones. But as neurobiologist Susan R. Barry argues, perception is a deeply personal act. Our environments, our relationships, and our actions shape and reshape our senses throughout our lives. This idea is no more apparent than in the cases of people who gain senses as adults. Barry tells the stories of Liam McCoy, practically blind from birth, and Zohra Damji, born deaf, in the decade following surgeries that restored their senses. As Liam and Zohra learned entirely new ways of being, Barry discovered an entirely new model of the nature of perception. Coming to Our Senses is a celebration of human resilience and a powerful reminder that, before you can really understand other people, you must first recognize that their worlds are fundamentally different from your own.

About Susan R. Barry

Susan R. Barry is Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College. She had been cross-eyed and stereoblind since early infancy but learned to see in three dimensions at age forty-eight by retraining her visual system with optometric vision therapy. Her story was first described by Oliver Sacks in his New Yorker article, Stereo Sue, and then greatly expanded by Sue in her book, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions. Her most recent book is Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, A Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World.


Reviews

3.5 stars An interesting work of popular science, using the stories of two young people who had to learn to see and hear as teenagers to illustrate how these senses work. The author is a science professor, but the book is definitely readable for a general audience, as well as relatively short. Interes......more

Goodreads review by Yolande

November: Non-fiction I found this book by accident, searching for something completely unrelated on my local library's catalogue. What a serendipitous find! Coming To Our Senses is a work of popular science which focuses on the case studies of two young people, Liam who was born blind and Najma who......more

Five stars for the biography part, making allowance for a book this size. 2.5 for the science, and 3-3.5 for philosophy and psychology parts, for 4-ish overall. (Slightly less elsewhere.) Barry builds on the likes of Oliver Sacks on how blind/near-blind and deaf/near-deaf people from at or near birth......more

Goodreads review by Scott

I picked up this book because I really wanted to read a book about stories from people who experience life and reality differently than the majority of us. This book definitely hits the mark. I also enjoyed this book because it is difficult to take personal stories and blend it with scientific jargo......more


Quotes

"Absolutely fascinating."—Temple Grandin

"What would happen if you had a new sense grafted on your body? Sue Barry is alert to the many fascinating details of how Liam and Zohra navigated their new sensory experiences, essentially giving the reader a lab course in experimental philosophy. This moving work of biography and scholarship explores the deep questions that arise when people choose to live in bodies that have been made new and strange.”—Michael Chorost, author of, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human

"Coming to Our Senses is an engaging and illuminating book. Barry’s intimate account of people who gained the ability to see and hear as adults offers rich insights into how we shape, and our shaped by, our senses. Along the way Barry teaches us much about vision, hearing and the human capacity to and adapt."—Dennis M. Levi, UC Berkeley