Dr. Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, writes that scientists believed human mental processes included computation and abstraction. That’s it. Dr. Sacks, in examining a patient he refers to as Dr. P, identified that another mental process factor is judgment.
If Dr. P. took his shoes off, he would think his bare feet are shoes. You can imagine Mrs. P.’s surprise when her husband tried to pull her head off her body so that he could “put his hat on.” His perception of the world via his senses is not operating correctly — he has agnosia.
Dr. Sacks noticed that Dr. P. would hum to himself. Dr. P. could easily dress himself and carry on living provided he kept the music going in his head. It’s almost as if he perceived the world through music and sound. He could do the things he needed to do, he teach music, he could recognize his music students (if they moved around and he could hear them), but he couldn’t make the right judgments.
Dr. Sacks writes that for too long doctors and scientists did not consider judgment a part of human mental processes. He writes: “Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia essentially similar to Dr. P.’s. Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable — of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computation.”
I say, of what happens to our work with people when we lose sight or discount judgment, uniqueness, personal, and sonder to favor process and numbers? I argue our work fails.