As the girl who cried and thrashed through her first tattoo—of a bleeding heart flower—I always have been a very sensitive person. Besides being quite emotive, I possess a very responsive nervous system, and all my life have depended heavily upon my visual and tactile senses to understand the world around me. While at the WSF’s latest event, celebrating the release of Oliver Sacks’ latest book “Hallucinations,” I was thrilled to have the opportunity to ask Sacks during the Q&A about the neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia—a sort of overlapping of the senses, in which one might for example hear the color blue. For example, when I do math, hear music, or memorize speeches, I usually have and even depend upon my visual imagination. To add 600 and 500, I picture 500 “filling in” and then “overlapping” the space occupied by 100. After reading the autobiography of Daniel Tammet, a well-known “full-spectrum” synesthete, I wondered if I might in some way be like this man. Tammet has involuntary, lifelong, consistent sensory overlappings—each color has a number, has a texture, has a sound etc. But I did see many resemblances between mine and Tammet’s “visual mathematics.” Does there exist some kind …

“The Justin Bieber of Neurologists.” That’s how NPR’s John Hockenberry—noting that the World Science Festival program “Hallucinations with Oliver Sacks” had sold out in a matter of hours—described the celebrated doctor and best-selling author. Their conversation at The Cooper Union on Friday, November 9, was both humorous and compelling, and marked the debut of Sacks’ new book, Hallucinations. The evening also kicked off the festival’s new year-round series, Science & Story. Sacks, renowned for investigating the odd workings of the human mind, described vivid accounts of people who see, hear, smell, even feel things that aren’t actually there. “You think it’s real but other people don’t agree with you,” Sacks explained.