The Man Who Tasted Shapes

by Richard E. Cytowic

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Richard E. Cytowic. The Man Who Tasted Shapes: A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into Emotions, Reasoning, and Consciousness.  296 pp. $24.95      

When Richard Cytowic, a neurologist, found a man who reported sensations of shapes in response to various tastes, he developed a curiosity about crossed-sensory perceptions that are technically called synesthesias. He first explored the literature and research reports, finding limited and inconsistent impressions in the published literature. He then studied people in his clinical practice who reported these experiences.

Cytowic made some unusual observations - for a neurologist. I quote his words in some detail, to illustrate his gifts for deep observations, wise understandings of the human condition, and delightful clarity of descriptions and explanations.

Not everything we are capable of knowing and doing is accessible to or expressible in language. This means that some of our personal knowledge is off limits even to our own inner thoughts! Perhaps this is why humans are so often at odds with themselves, because there is more going on in our minds that we can ever consciously know. (p. 17)

Furthermore, in the process of his explorations and clinical work, he became a champion of clinical assessments by the physician – rather than relying primarily on instrumented diagnostics. Although he does not appear to identify himself as such, his work clearly fits well in the wholistic healing spectrum. Cytowic's trenchant observations speak best for themselves.

I also sensed that a prevalent attitude, no matter what the specialty, was that the history of medicine had noting to teach the present, and if symptoms could not be measured with a machine, then they were imaginary. All around me I found people willing to trade in their own judgments for ones made by a machine. Anything from the past was thrown without question on the scrap heap with the leeches. (p. 31)

We have paid with dollars and our humanity ever since the stethoscope appeared as the first instrument to come between patient and physician. The art of medicine has steadily yielded to the calculus of objectivity and the tabulation of hard data… Machine interposition has increased exponentially, until today we have hardly any touching and little real human contract. Patients have been reduced to objects, and physicians to dispassionate feeders of the machines. (p. 38)

In the sense that third-party insurers are bureaucrats, they constitute yet another “machine” that stands between doctor and patient. Bean counters with hearts of stone have replaced compassion and caring. (p. 39)

I believe that, hardly realizing it, we have come to serve technology even though we intended for it to serve us. The machine is held in such high esteem that, in medicine, many implicitly believe that caring is what is left for physicians to do when technical intervention has failed. (p. 40)
Refusing to conform to this trend, Cytowic persisted in promoting his clinical neurological observations as valid assessments, in and of themselves. He succeeded in getting the insurance companies to accept his clinical assessments as valid diagnostic information.

Cytowic also criticizes his medical colleagues, who have very authoritarian, arrogant attitudes and assume that their knowledge is the be-all and end-all of what is available in clinical knowledge. He goes on to champion the validity of intuitive knowledge and awarenesses based on inner experiences; and to advocate for accepting people's subjective reports as real and helpful information about their lives and conditions.

Cytowic understands the endless regress of modern scientific inquiry, which cannot ever arrive at its stated goal of ultimate understanding and control of our world.

I was intellectually attracted by the complexity of the life of the mind, but I was disappointed, too, that any promise of an explanation was an illusion. No matter how many questions you answer, you are always left asking more. There is no such thing as final understanding because understanding is an endless process. Answering one round of questions only takes you to a higher plane of understanding that makes you ask a higher level of questions. The experience of living itself is such a process. (p. 43)

Cytowic proposes that emotions govern our behavior rather than logic and reason. He presents detailed observations to support this observation – which will be the meat of this book for my medical colleagues. He goes on to point out that we are still unable to localize many of the functions of the mind, even though we have clearly identified them.

What we know of as our conscious, rational self is not in control; some other part of us is. Moreover, this unfathomable part is capable of producing some great behavior, which is all the wonderful, irrational, and interesting stuff that humans do. (p.178)

Bringing reason to bear on what we are doing often interferes with it. Rational logic does not change the baby’s diaper, find the file you are looking for, or drive you to work.
(p. 179)

This book is an excellent read, in addition to being a book of great scientific interest.

Review by Daniel J. Benor, MD, IJHC Editor in Chief

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