“There are two kinds of people: Earthlings and Martians”
Dr. David West Keirsey

People who are generally observant are more ‘down to earth.’ – Earthlings

People who are generally introspective are more ‘head in the clouds.’ – Martians

This iNgenous Martian wrote a book.  

And he will have written and published 12 other books, including his autobiography, when he will die later this year. For he has realized he has terminal cancer.

“I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.“

Oliver Sacks has chronicled his understandings and insights about the brain thru books since 1970.

He became famous after his book Awakenings was made a Hollywood movie, with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro playing the main characters of Sacks’ book.

Oliver Wolf Sacks, An Engineering [Inventor or Architect] Rational, CBE (born 9 July 1933) is an American-British neurologist, writer, and amateur chemist who is Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine. Sacks is the author of numerous best-selling books, including several collections of case studies of people with neurological disorders. [Wikipedia, revised]

Beginning in 1970, Sacks wrote of his experience with neurological patients. His books have been translated into over 25 languages. In addition to his books, Sacks is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, as well as other medical, scientific, and general publications. He was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 2001.

Sacks’ work has been featured in a “broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author”  His descriptions of people coping with and adapting to neurological conditions or injuries often illuminate the ways in which the normal brain deals with perception, memory and individuality.

• Migraine (1970)
• Awakenings (1973)
• A Leg to Stand On (1984)
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)
• Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf (1989) Online access
• An Anthropologist on Mars (1995)
• The Island of the Colorblind (1997)
• Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)
• Oaxaca Journal (2002)
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007)
• The Mind’s Eye (2010)
• Hallucinations (2012)
• On the Move (2015) (autobiography)

The Engineering Rationals are fascinated with the enigmatic, the paradoxical, and the inexplicable. They are especially intrigued with complex problems or puzzles, and will use puzzles to keep their ingenuity honed, rather like a cat sharpening its claws on a particularly attractive piece of furniture. Puzzles, especially logical puzzles, are almost irresistible to them, and they will sometimes put aside the work they need to get done in order to tackle for a while some especially intriguing conundrum.

The converse of this is that Engineers are not very good at small talk. Chit chat is not demanding and therefore not interesting. It is usually drawn out and merely redundant, rather than complex, and this makes it merely enervating to the Engineer. At times Engineers may wonder why others waste their time and breath on what is, to them, such a pointless and dull activity.  [Presidential Temperament]

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgOTaXhbqPQ]

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us–through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique.” ― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Engineering Rationals examples:

Other Architect Rationals include: Leonhard Euler,  James Madison, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Emmy Noether, Paul Dirac, Robert Rosen, David Keirsey, Albert Einstein, Lonnie Athens, David Bohm

Other Inventor Rationals include: Atul Gawande, Larry Page, Elaine Morgan, Lynn Margulis, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Joseph James Sylvester, Frances Crick, Paul Allen, Werner Von Braun, Wolfgang Pauli, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Hedy Lamarr, Julius Sumner Miller, and Zhang Xin