With this in mind, I took off my white coat, deserted, fully and literally, from the hospitals where I spent the last twenty-five years, to explore the lives of my patients as they live in the real world, feeling partly like a naturalist examining rare forms of life and partly like an anthropologist, like a neuroanthropologist in the field of research - but above all like a doctor who is called here and there to make house calls, house calls to the farthest frontiers of human experience.
These are stories of transformation, as dictated by neurological fate, transformations into alternative states of existence, other forms of life, different, but equally human.
A painter, after an accident, loses the perception of colors; a surgeon suffering from Tourette's syndrome, has tics, except when he is operating; an autistic woman, for whom the world of humans is incomprehensible, specializes in the study of animals.
Individuals suffering from similar neurological dysfunctions resemble travelers crossing uncharted continents. Seven of these travelers are presented in this book. In order to understand them, the author met with them and shared, for a while, their lives.
The seven stories he narrates seem paradoxical because they show us that neurological conditions are not exclusively diseases - they open up new worlds, strange to common experience, but where other riches are revealed, only latent in the normal person.
The painter who has lost the perception of colors will create a monochromatic artistic world, with unusual and profound beauty; and the autistic woman will continue to encounter the mysteries of human society - feeling, however, as she tells us, "like an anthropologist on Mars."
