The man who saw numbers as a jumble of spaghetti
Happy Diwali.
Wherever you are in this world, may you find contentment and peace.
I was looking back at photos from last year and thinking to myself, “what a year it’s been!”. Yesterday, we lost Soumitra Chatterjee, one of the finest actors in the world, to COVID-19, and it feels like a personal blow. We may be tired, but the pandemic continues to impact every aspect of our lives.
I’m writing a longer piece on vaccines that will come out later this week, but we have yet another grim reminder that even when the vaccine comes for us, it will be too late for so many.
So, enough of COVID-19. I want to discuss something completely different this week.
Differing perceptions
Imagine the whole of perception being like a crystal sculpture. It breaks. The shards scatter. Think of each shard as a modality, an indivisible unit representing one aspect of perception. We are now free to reassemble the sculpture any way we like, but even if we tried to glue to back exactly the way it was, we would certainly stick together a few shards that certainly didn’t go together.
—Richard Cytowic (from Synesthesia, MIT Press, 2018)
Earlier this week, I had been reading about the curious case of a 60-year-old man, RFS who had developed an extremely rare neurological condition. Whenever RFS was presented with the numbers between 2 and 9, he saw and recreated on paper a jumble of spaghetti. When two circles were far apart, RFS could distinguish them, but as soon as they approached closer to form an “8,” it was a random string of threads. This is what he recreated.
Every time numbers were shown, a different jumble appeared to the man. It was not possible for him to associate any pattern with a number, because there was no consistency. He could distinguish 1 and 0 and could also make out Roman numerals, but not the numbers from 2 to 9. He understood the concept of numbers and was a reasonable mathematician, having worked until recently as an engineering geologist. What was going on in his brain?
I immediately thought of Oliver Sacks. Sacks was a writer who had expanded our thinking of the workings of the human brain through his books on people he had encountered as a clinical neurologist. Here is a passage that Sacks had written decades ago in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Neurology’s favorite word is ‘deficit’, denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties). For all of these dysfunctions (another favorite term), we have privative words of every sort—Aphonia, Aphemia, Aphasia, Alexia, Apraxia, Agnosia, Amnesia, Ataxia—a word for every specific neural or mental function of which patients, through disease, or injury, or failure to develop, may find themselves partly or wholly deprived.
But there is a wide range of human experiences and perceptions, and these are not necessarily deficits: these are differences. Some people see numbers differently. Some people can taste letters. Some people see colors in musical notes. There is nothing special about our senses. It's the same electrical and chemical signals. Crossed wires can happen pretty easily. There's even a theory that all small infants are synesthetes— that all of their senses are jumbled up because they haven't formed tight neuronal connections and pruned off excess synapses.
Here is another patient that Sacks had met—
His eyes would dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features, individual features, as they had done with my face. A striking brightness, a color, a shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment—but in no case did he get the scene-as-a-whole. He failed to see the whole, seeing only details, which he spotted like blips on a radar screen. He never entered into relation with the picture as a whole—never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He had no sense whatever of a landscape or scene.
I showed him the cover, an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes. ‘What do you see here?’ I asked.
‘I see a river,’ he said. ‘And a little guest-house with its terrace on
the water. People are dining out on the terrace. I see colored parasols here and there.’ He was looking, if it was ‘looking’, right off the cover into midair and confabulating nonexistent features, as if the absence of features in the actual picture had driven him to imagine the river and the terrace and the colored parasols.
We all see the world differently. What we consider normal is a statistical average.
The condition of the man who saw numbers as spaghetti was being dubbed digit metamorphopsia. Scientists believe that there are many stages to awareness than simply seeing and identifying an object. There are specialized areas in the brain that deal with numbers and RFS is different in that way.
“It is puzzling that RFS could distinguish 0s and 1s but not the other numbers,” I thought to myself. Scientists are not quite sure why.
Reference:
Lack of awareness despite complex visual processing: Evidence from event-related potentials in a case of selective metamorphopsia. PNAS. July 7, 2020 117 (27) 16055-16064
The link for the hardcover “COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction” is now available on Amazon’s Indian site.
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