Wow, what a fascinating, intriguing, mind-bending book, written by an expert in the field. Definitely gives you a new perspective on the five senses. A must-read by anyone who is remotely interested in how our senses work and how it can go wrong.
Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martins Press for providing a free electronic copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. #TheManWhoTastedWords #NetGalley

The Man Who Tasted Words is an absolutely fascinating look into how our senses work and, sometimes, how they don't. The author is a neurologist with years of experience but he is also a talented writer - while a lot of this book is pure science, he writes about it in an easy-to-understand way and uses real-life examples of human senses acting wrong. I loved how much Leschziner managed to change my mind and make me reflect on things I considered obvious - for example, at the beginning of the book he asks the reader to rank the senses they feel are most important to living a full life. Of course, most of us would probably rank sight or hearing first, with smell and taste at the end of the list. But Leschziner proves that it's not that simple - being unable to hug your loved ones or even be in the same room as them because suddenly their smell is unbearable, or possibly losing your dream career as a sommelier because you can't taste the wine anymore are examples that we don't think about often, but that happened in real life.

I struggle a lot with health anxiety so this book was at times scarier than any horror book I could've picked up, but it was simply so captivating I couldn't stop reading. It's a perfect read for anyone who is interested and curious about how we perceive everything around us, but also wants to understand how many elements must come together for us to experience the world in the way that we do.

This is a nerdy book for those nerds who like to nerd out about things they like to nerd about. Not to technical and very human, Leschziner walks through human senses one at a time, giving case studies and enough biological background to help show how important each sense is. From a woman losing her sight several times to a man who can't stop hearing everything around him to a person who can lose their balance while sitting still, the story goes in depth while keeping the focus on the people involved.

Imagine that you felt no pain whatsoever. While yes, you could do things like jump off buildings and not feel it, think about all the compound fractures and other nightmares to the body that you'd endure, without knowing about it. In the new book The Man Who Tasted Words, Dr. Guy Leschziner explores the nervous system and talks about how our neurological structures work, and how sometimes they can cause us to believe fake things about the world around us.

The title references the case of a man who had a type of synesthesia which causes him to actually taste words. This can happen when our brains cross wires. He discusses the case of a family where all the children developed normally, save for pain receptors, and the nightmare it was for their parents. I still can vividly remember a passage in which the patient described breaking his own fingers in front of his parents when they denied him a snack before dinner. Dr. Leschziner's work is accessible for the casual reader, so this book doesn't feel like a slog of a textbook. It is absolutely fascinating for everyone who has wondered what life would be like without one of their senses, or one that is seemingly wired incorrectly by our nervous system.

The Man Who Tasted Words is available from St. Martin's Press on February 22, 2022.

A very good book for those that want to know more about how we experience the world but still simply enough for those with out a degree

Amazing! This story is great for anyone that is interested how the brain works! Highly recommend to everyone

A superb book for anyone who’s interested in how our brains work and how this affects our perception of reality. We’re taught that there’s a real world out there, and our five senses feed information to the brain that tells us what it is. Turns out, that’s all wrong. For a start, there are a lot more than five senses. Second, the senses feed a tiny fraction of the available information to the brain, and the brain just kind of guesses at the rest. And third, the brain doesn’t just passively accept information, it feeds back predictions to the senses on what it expects to see. (And, perhaps most fascinating of all, it calls into question whether there even is such a thing as objective reality - who’s to say one brain’s model of the world is more or less accurate than somebody else’s, or whether they’re actually the same?)

This has some important implications. When the sensory system is damaged, either by genetic mutation, physical injury, neurochemical imbalance, or whatever, the information it sends can be inaccurate, incomplete, or unreliable. So the brain fills in the rest, based on faulty data. And sometimes, it gets it very, very wrong. So you get people whose senses are completely mixed up - they perceive tastes or colors associated with vision or sound (synesthesia), or they can’t perceive objects in part of their field of view but they can tell if they’re moving. If you’ve read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, you’ll be familiar with this kind of thing.

Leschziner, a consultant neurologist in London, digs into dozens of case histories to illustrate how different people perceive the world differently. His style is very easy to read, and always entertaining, but informative and packed with valuable information.

Highly recommended.

(Note: I received a free pre-release copy from the publisher. Illustrations were not included.)

Fascinating, exciting, wonderous, WOW! The author does a great job at telling how the 5 senses create our reality and if one of the senses is off-kilter it will/could be disastrous.
I was fascinated with the stories, Paul and his no feeling of pain really made me stop and think about what it would really be like to not feel pain.
The seeing of colors while playing music, I felt like I was in a garden.
The toxin poisoning making the lady feel the opposite of hot and cold was fascinating.
There is so much that we don't know still about the human body.

I felt that the author did a great job at telling the stories, relating how it applies to the real world and even geeking out (seeing as how the author is a Doctor this is understandable) with medical terminology.

This is a must read book for anyone curious about our senses and how we perceive the world.