In-person | Book Discussion: Coming to Our Senses with Susan Barry

Join us live and in-person on Tuesday, November 30 at 7 PM as Sue Barry discusses her new book, , Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, A Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World.

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Susan R. Barry received her Ph.D. in biology from Princeton University and is Professor Emeritus of biology and neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College.  In 2009, she published her first book, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions which has been translated into seven languages and was voted the fourth-best science book of 2009 by the editors of Amazon.com.  In Fixing My Gaze, Sue describes her experience of gaining 3D vision after a lifetime of being stereoblind.  This experience heightened her interest in sensory recovery which is further pursued in her latest book, Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, A Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World.