"A quarter of a century after her first book, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin--the "anthropologist from Mars," as Oliver Sacks dubbed her--transforms our understanding of the different ways our brains are wired. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously understood, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the purest "object visualizers" like Grandin herself,...

"On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod left his dorm-room to play a pick-up game of basketball. In the skirmish for a loose ball, a boy's finger hooked behind Axelrod's eyeball and severed his optic nerve. Permanently blinded in his right eye, Axelrod returned a week later to the same dorm-room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the smooth veneer of reality had been broken,...