Coming to Our Senses
A Boy Who Learned to See, a Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World
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Coming to Our Senses
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Narrated by:
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Rengin Altay
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By:
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Susan R. Barry
About this listen
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.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2021 Susan R. Barry (P)2021 Basic BooksCritic Reviews
"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)