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The Mind's Eye
In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world.
There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties.
There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read.
And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side.
Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading?
The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.
From the Hardcover edition.
An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.
There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties.
There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read.
And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side.
Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading?
The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.
From the Hardcover edition.
An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.
273 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 20, 2010
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About the author
Oliver Sacks
102 books9,760 followersOliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, was a British neurologist residing in the United States, who has written popular books about his patients, the most famous of which is Awakenings, which was adapted into a film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.
Sacks was the youngest of four children born to a prosperous North London Jewish couple: Sam, a physician, and Elsie, a surgeon. When he was six years old, he and his brother were evacuated from London to escape The Blitz, retreating to a boarding school in the Midlands, where he remained until 1943. During his youth, he was a keen amateur chemist, as recalled in his memoir Uncle Tungsten. He also learned to share his parents' enthusiasm for medicine and entered The Queen's College, Oxford University in 1951, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in physiology and biology in 1954. At the same institution, he went on to earn in 1958, a Master of Arts (MA) and an MB ChB in chemistry, thereby qualifying to practice medicine.
After converting his British qualifications to American recognition (i.e., an MD as opposed to MB ChB), Sacks moved to New York, where he has lived since 1965, and taken twice weekly therapy sessions since 1966.
Sacks began consulting at chronic care facility Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Health Service) in 1966. At Beth Abraham, Sacks worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. These patients and his treatment of them were the basis of Sacks' book Awakenings.
His work at Beth Abraham helped provide the foundation on which the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF), where Sacks is currently an honorary medical advisor, is built. In 2000, IMNF honored Sacks, its founder, with its first Music Has Power Award. The IMNF again bestowed a Music Has Power Award on Sacks in 2006 to commemorate "his 40 years at Beth Abraham and honor his outstanding contributions in support of music therapy and the effect of music on the human brain and mind".
Sacks was formerly employed as a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and at the New York University School of Medicine, serving the latter school for 42 years. On 1 July 2007, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons appointed Sacks to a position as professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry, at the same time opening to him a new position as "artist", which the university hoped will help interconnect disciplines such as medicine, law, and economics. Sacks was a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor, and maintained a practice in New York City.
Since 1996, Sacks was a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature). In 1999, Sacks became a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. Also in 1999, he became an Honorary Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford. In 2002, he became Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Class IV—Humanities and Arts, Section 4—Literature).[38] and he was awarded the 2001 Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University. Sacks was awarded honorary doctorates from the College of Staten Island (1991), Tufts University (1991), New York Medical College (1991), Georgetown University (1992), Medical College of Pennsylvania (1992), Bard College (1992), Queen's University (Ontario) (2001), Gallaudet University (2005), University of Oxford (2005), Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2006). He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours. Asteroid 84928 Oliversacks, discovered in 2003 and 2 miles (3.2 km) in diameter, has been named in his honor.
Sacks was the youngest of four children born to a prosperous North London Jewish couple: Sam, a physician, and Elsie, a surgeon. When he was six years old, he and his brother were evacuated from London to escape The Blitz, retreating to a boarding school in the Midlands, where he remained until 1943. During his youth, he was a keen amateur chemist, as recalled in his memoir Uncle Tungsten. He also learned to share his parents' enthusiasm for medicine and entered The Queen's College, Oxford University in 1951, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in physiology and biology in 1954. At the same institution, he went on to earn in 1958, a Master of Arts (MA) and an MB ChB in chemistry, thereby qualifying to practice medicine.
After converting his British qualifications to American recognition (i.e., an MD as opposed to MB ChB), Sacks moved to New York, where he has lived since 1965, and taken twice weekly therapy sessions since 1966.
Sacks began consulting at chronic care facility Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Health Service) in 1966. At Beth Abraham, Sacks worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. These patients and his treatment of them were the basis of Sacks' book Awakenings.
His work at Beth Abraham helped provide the foundation on which the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF), where Sacks is currently an honorary medical advisor, is built. In 2000, IMNF honored Sacks, its founder, with its first Music Has Power Award. The IMNF again bestowed a Music Has Power Award on Sacks in 2006 to commemorate "his 40 years at Beth Abraham and honor his outstanding contributions in support of music therapy and the effect of music on the human brain and mind".
Sacks was formerly employed as a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and at the New York University School of Medicine, serving the latter school for 42 years. On 1 July 2007, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons appointed Sacks to a position as professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry, at the same time opening to him a new position as "artist", which the university hoped will help interconnect disciplines such as medicine, law, and economics. Sacks was a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor, and maintained a practice in New York City.
Since 1996, Sacks was a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature). In 1999, Sacks became a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. Also in 1999, he became an Honorary Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford. In 2002, he became Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Class IV—Humanities and Arts, Section 4—Literature).[38] and he was awarded the 2001 Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University. Sacks was awarded honorary doctorates from the College of Staten Island (1991), Tufts University (1991), New York Medical College (1991), Georgetown University (1992), Medical College of Pennsylvania (1992), Bard College (1992), Queen's University (Ontario) (2001), Gallaudet University (2005), University of Oxford (2005), Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2006). He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours. Asteroid 84928 Oliversacks, discovered in 2003 and 2 miles (3.2 km) in diameter, has been named in his honor.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,083 reviews
August 17, 2018
This one covers people who loses their senses and still find different ways of communicating or navigating the world. It was actually pretty cool to see the ingenuity and problem solving that can take place when people have to compensate for loss of various brain functions. I really liked Lilian's story and I was pretty interested in the dementia symptoms she showed but the rest of the book I could've done without. I didn't really get anything new out of the rest of it perspective wise and though he writes well, I don't really need to know that much about Oliver Sack's eye surgery because it wasn't like him being partially blind revealed anything new to me the reader about how the brain works, though it clearly gave him more perspective on how it must be for other patients. I also thought the whole facial recognition thing was dumb, like I'm sure that he's not exaggerating his inability to recognize places and faces but like who cares if it's real. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, he sucks with facial recognition woah. Maybe I just know enough about neuroscience at this point that this didn't really contribute anything new, and so someone else who knows less might find this much more fascinating. I just wish there was more substance to the book and Sacks concentrated on patient case histories rather than making such a large portion of the book about his own experiences which only seemed some what relevant to the theme of the book.
December 18, 2024
Dr. Oliver Sacks was a practicing neurologist and professor who wrote a number of popular books about people afflicted with neurological disorders and/or brain damage.
Dr. Oliver Sacks
In this book Sacks relates stories about patients who developed problems with their eyes or the 'vision' areas of the brain, including loss of the ability to read, inability to recognize everday objects, and impairment of stereoscopic and/or peripheral vision. Sacks also tells a very personal story about his own eye tumor.
Sacks starts with the story of Lillian Kallir, a gifted concert pianist who slowly lost her ability to read music, then words (writing), and finally the ability to identify mundane objects like a fruit or a violin. Through it all, Lillian retained her writing skills and maintained a lively correspondence - though she couldn't read what she wrote. (I'll admit, this seems REALLY strange to me.)
Lillian Kallir
In normal life Lillian functioned, in part, by memorizing the location of objects around her. Sacks tells a story of having tea at Lillian's house and inadvertently moving a plate of biscuits, after which Lillian could no longer 'see' the biscuits - though they were still on the table. Lillian never recovered her lost abilities but was able to live a (more or less) normal life because of her musical gifts, excellent memory, and the help of her husband, friends, and doctors.
Sacks also relates stories about other individuals who lost their ability to read and/or recognize objects - usually due to a stroke or brain injury - and how they coped (or didn't) with the problem. Some patients eventually recovered their capabilities, some didn't.
Another interesting topic Sacks address is the inability of some people (including himself) to recognize faces, a condition called prosopagnosia. This problem apparently plagued Sacks for all his life. He tells one story about leaving the office of his long-time psychiatrist, then meeting a gentleman in the lobby who addressed him in a friendly manner. Sacks had no idea who this was....until his psychiatrist identified himself. This problem can be so significant that some patients can't even identify their spouse or children in an 'out of context' situation. Prosopagnosia apparently affects a significant proportion of the population, and sufferers must develop coping mechanisms as best they can. (The actor, Brad Pitt, said he suffers from this condition.)
In the most personal part of the book Sacks relates his own experience with an eye tumor, his radiation and laser treatments, and the eventual loss of almost all vision in his right eye. This resulted in a diminution of both stereoscopic and peripheral vision.
Again, in his humorous self-deprecating style, Sacks relates incidents of missing stairs, bumping into and tripping over furniture and dogs, and not seeing things around him. He relates the discomfiture of having people or objects 'disappear' from his right side, then suddenly appear again.
Sacks goes on to relate the stories of several people who either gained or lost stereoscopic vision. One woman who obtained stereoscopic vision after seeing everything in only two dimensions was mesmerized by seeing, for the first time, her steering wheel projecting from the dashboard and her rear-view mirror sticking out from the windshield. Overall, (for me) these sections are the weakest part of the book, being too long and repetitive.
Along with the various stories in the book Sacks discusses parts of the brain that are specialized for specific 'visual' functions, how these brain areas interact, and how malfunction or damage in these areas affects people's vision, reading, object recognition, and so on.
All in all, an interesting and informative book.
You can follow my reviews at https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot....
November 28, 2025
في منتصف العام الماضي، حل علينا ضيف مؤقت لفترة قصيرة. فأر صغير :)
لمحته يجري مسرعا داخل غرفتي الضيقة، وبدون الدخول في تفاصيل الصراخ والرعب المعتادين في مثل هذه المواقف، تخلصنا منه بعدها بأيام قليلة بفضل لاصق وضعناه في المطبخ بعدما نقل اقامته إليه من غرفتي.
ومن وقتها، وأنا أرى بصفة مستمرة-بجانب عيني-خيالات لا تتوقف لشبح صغير يجري في أي مكان في الشقة. ناهيك عن هوس الخيالات السمعية كلما سمعت صوت "خروشة أو خربشة" داخل المطبخ.
ما الذي يحدث داخل عقولنا؟ كيف تتكون الصورة من عدم؟ كيف أرى خيالا لشىء أسود متجسدا أمامي وهو غير موجود في الواقع؟ كيف أستيقظ في بعض الأحيان على صوت مألوف
يناديني بنبرات واضحة لا لبس فيها، وبالطبع، صاحب هذا الصوت غير موجود معي في نفس المكان، أو لم يعد له وجود في الحياة في المقام الأول؟
في هذا الكتاب الممتع، يأخذنا أوليفر ساكس طبيب الأعصاب الشهير في رحلة داخل العقل البشري المذهل في ضعفه، والمذهل أيضا في قوته لتعويض هذا الضعف. فهمت من خلال هذا الكتاب أن من الطبيعي أن "تخلق" حواسنا وجودا لمرئيات وسمعيات غير موجودة، في الوقت الذي قد تفشل فيه تلك الحواس في التعرف على المثيرات الموجودة بالفعل.
كتاب مثير للفكر، وللحزن، وللخوف...
ماذا لو حدث لي ما حدث لأي حالة من الحالات المذكورة في الكتاب؟
كتابة يسيرة وترجمة سلسة جعلتني استمتع بقراءة هذا الكتاب على عكس الكتاب السابق لنفس المؤلف "الرجل الذي حسب زوجته قبعة" والذي وقفت ترجمته غير اليسيرة في طريق استمتاعي به.
لمحته يجري مسرعا داخل غرفتي الضيقة، وبدون الدخول في تفاصيل الصراخ والرعب المعتادين في مثل هذه المواقف، تخلصنا منه بعدها بأيام قليلة بفضل لاصق وضعناه في المطبخ بعدما نقل اقامته إليه من غرفتي.
ومن وقتها، وأنا أرى بصفة مستمرة-بجانب عيني-خيالات لا تتوقف لشبح صغير يجري في أي مكان في الشقة. ناهيك عن هوس الخيالات السمعية كلما سمعت صوت "خروشة أو خربشة" داخل المطبخ.
ما الذي يحدث داخل عقولنا؟ كيف تتكون الصورة من عدم؟ كيف أرى خيالا لشىء أسود متجسدا أمامي وهو غير موجود في الواقع؟ كيف أستيقظ في بعض الأحيان على صوت مألوف
يناديني بنبرات واضحة لا لبس فيها، وبالطبع، صاحب هذا الصوت غير موجود معي في نفس المكان، أو لم يعد له وجود في الحياة في المقام الأول؟
في هذا الكتاب الممتع، يأخذنا أوليفر ساكس طبيب الأعصاب الشهير في رحلة داخل العقل البشري المذهل في ضعفه، والمذهل أيضا في قوته لتعويض هذا الضعف. فهمت من خلال هذا الكتاب أن من الطبيعي أن "تخلق" حواسنا وجودا لمرئيات وسمعيات غير موجودة، في الوقت الذي قد تفشل فيه تلك الحواس في التعرف على المثيرات الموجودة بالفعل.
كتاب مثير للفكر، وللحزن، وللخوف...
ماذا لو حدث لي ما حدث لأي حالة من الحالات المذكورة في الكتاب؟
كتابة يسيرة وترجمة سلسة جعلتني استمتع بقراءة هذا الكتاب على عكس الكتاب السابق لنفس المؤلف "الرجل الذي حسب زوجته قبعة" والذي وقفت ترجمته غير اليسيرة في طريق استمتاعي به.
June 26, 2011
I listened to this one as a talking book. There were many, many times when I nearly stopped listening to it. The problem was that Sacks himself didn’t read very much of the book – his eye troubles have made reading difficult for him. By far the best parts of this talking book were when he was doing the reading. You would nearly think that the producers of this audio book picked the person to read the other bits of the book as a way to convince Sacks he should just do the whole damn thing himself.
The guy who reads most of this one is easily the worst reader of talking books I’ve ever heard – and that includes some of the really poor readers they get on Libravox. The best way I can explain his ‘style’ is to think of a scene from Get Smart where Max thinks he is unassailable. Think of that smug, too-clever-by-half voice of his and that is nearly exactly the voice this guy used the whole way through. Often it nearly completely distracted me from the meaning of what I was listening to.
I’ve an astigmatism, quite an impressive one, really. It is part of the reason I know what it means to learn to read, whereas so many other people I know have no memory of ever learning to read – my astigmatism and my going to seven different primary schools made learning to read increasingly difficult and seemingly unlikely for me as things went along. It wasn’t until I was in grade four that a teacher finally worked out the problem – I was too stupid to squint and so my near blindness was never picked up.
It took years before I finally found out that I had an astigmatism, before that I just knew I couldn’t see very well – when I was first told I thought the word was ‘stigmata’ and so, when I looked it up in the dictionary, thought it was somehow related to a scar on the eye. I wonder now why an optometrist might think to tell an adolescent boy they have an astigmatism and yet not go on to explain what that defect actually amounts to – effectively a misshapen lens.
Another time – or perhaps the same time, I can’t really remember now – I was told that I would never read below the fifth line of a particular chart. It is only now that I realise that one is shown so many charts when getting one’s eyes checked that everyone would be in more or less the same boat. No matter how good your eyes there will always be a chart in which you can only see to the fifth line eventually. But I took this to mean that even with glasses I would always have less than perfect vision. It was only last year that I was told that with my glasses on I had 20/20 vision. I actually had to ask the optometrist to repeat that to me. I had always ‘known’ that my eyesight was so bad, even with glasses on, that it was less than ‘normal’. So her telling me that was not (and had not been) the case completely threw me. The point being that I’ve never quite known what ‘normal’ might be, but I had always just assumed that normal was something different from what I could actually see. To find out that I am, in fact, Mr Normal came as quite a surprise.
This book is about seeing. For those of us who can see there seems to be nothing more normal in the world. And those of us who can see generally can think of nothing worse than not being able to see. The choice between being dead and being blind seems, in so many ways, quite a difficult choice to make in theory. But what is very interesting in this book is that while we might well think there is one way to be blind and millions of ways of seeing – in fact, seeing is such a complicated and strange phenomenon that there are even people with no eyes at all who can still ‘see’ in certain senses.
I’m going to have to learn more about dyslexia. A lot of this book is about people with degenerative disorders – strokes and such – that stop them being able to read. Cases where they can see the letters and even see the words, but are no longer able to make any sense of them. These are the kinds of stories that make you think someone is taking the piss. The problem is that the complexity of the task involved in reading is such that highly particular dysfunctions in one part of the brain can lead to highly peculiar behaviours in the person suffering from that dysfunction.
Sacks even has a chapter on his own problem with sight – brought about by a cancer growth in his eye. This is a particularly interesting chapter for a great number of reasons, but not least because he talks about a curious stereo vision thing happening when he was smoking cannabis one night. You might like to google an image of Mr Sacks now for the full implications of this little confession to take effect. I don’t know about you, but he just isn’t the sort of person I would immediately associate with smoking a little blue.
Needing to wear glasses has always made sight seem something of infinite value to me. I remember the first time I looked at my brother’s face after getting them and seeing he had freckles. There was a real sense that I had never really seen his face before. Or the time I first wore contact lenses and how sharp and clear my focus was looking over the Alexandra Gardens in a 64 tram down St Kilda Road – but the pain of them proved too much for me to bother with despite the manifest improvement in sight they gave. Anyway, I look naked without glasses on, and, oddly enough, generally I am.
There is an article here about a women who got stereo vision quite late on in life. There is some evidence that many artists did not have stereo vision (they can tell by looking at photos of them and making measurements of their eyes) and so they saw the world as a flat two-dimensional plane. This woman would sit for hours fascinated by the sense of depth, of how things jumped out at her into the third dimension she had never known existed before. I really could identify with this woman in my own small way.
Sacks does some name dropping in this book, but not of the boring sort of thick actress or member of the royal family others do – but people I would give my right arm to have known. He mentions writing to the Russian psychologist Luria at one point (someone who has become a bit of a hero to me), he also mentions a tall guy called Jonathan Miller (who I assume is THE Jonathan Miller and who has always been one of my heroes) and then in passing mentions that he wrote to Simon Winchester to congratulate him on one of his talking books.
Now, I’m going to end in a second, but I wanted to talk about talking books for a bit first. Sacks says he doesn’t generally like them. He talks of a blind woman in this book who finds her eyes get tired when she listens to them. She visually constructs the text in her head that she is listening to and effectively reads along with the voice. I don’t do anything like this. I listen to talking books for hours of every day – while I drive, while I cook, while I walk to the station. They are my constant companions. People have mentioned to me that they are only meant for the blind or the illiterate – something that makes we feel very sorry for them.
Sacks talks about visualisation and how this might well be the third great cognitive ability, he says he is following Colin McGinn (the philosopher) in this. I was thinking of other things when this was mentioned in the book and so missed what the other two were – though I think one of them was making sense of sensual data and maybe the other was linguistic ability – but I could be wrong. Anyway, this got me thinking about visualisation. My ex-wife once told me that I could improve my spelling (always hopeless until my late twenties) by doing what she did. She would just visualise the word in her mind and then copy it onto the paper. She might as well have said, “flying is simple, you just fall at the ground and miss” as Douglas Adams would have it. Marx says somewhere that the difference between a bee making a hive and a person making a house is that even the worst builder making a house has an image in their mind of the final product – the bee does not. Unfortunately, I am that bee. The odd thing is that I’m quite good at connecting visual images – I tend to use images in powerpoint presentations in metaphorical ways, but the thing is that this is in no way natural for me and (as odd as this might sound) in no way ‘visual’ – if you know what I mean. I can’t call up the image, but I will often have a feeling that I can use a certain image to make a certain point, but it is an almost subconscious awareness. In trying to call up, for example, to my mind’s eye now a famous image, say, the Mona Lisa, all I can ever really see is a kind of grey lead pencil tracing of it that fades to white as soon as my concentration is relaxed.
Sight has more to do with the mind than we might like to imagine – and this is a fascinating look at when things go wrong that might just get you wondering about your own visual life. Enjoy.
The guy who reads most of this one is easily the worst reader of talking books I’ve ever heard – and that includes some of the really poor readers they get on Libravox. The best way I can explain his ‘style’ is to think of a scene from Get Smart where Max thinks he is unassailable. Think of that smug, too-clever-by-half voice of his and that is nearly exactly the voice this guy used the whole way through. Often it nearly completely distracted me from the meaning of what I was listening to.
I’ve an astigmatism, quite an impressive one, really. It is part of the reason I know what it means to learn to read, whereas so many other people I know have no memory of ever learning to read – my astigmatism and my going to seven different primary schools made learning to read increasingly difficult and seemingly unlikely for me as things went along. It wasn’t until I was in grade four that a teacher finally worked out the problem – I was too stupid to squint and so my near blindness was never picked up.
It took years before I finally found out that I had an astigmatism, before that I just knew I couldn’t see very well – when I was first told I thought the word was ‘stigmata’ and so, when I looked it up in the dictionary, thought it was somehow related to a scar on the eye. I wonder now why an optometrist might think to tell an adolescent boy they have an astigmatism and yet not go on to explain what that defect actually amounts to – effectively a misshapen lens.
Another time – or perhaps the same time, I can’t really remember now – I was told that I would never read below the fifth line of a particular chart. It is only now that I realise that one is shown so many charts when getting one’s eyes checked that everyone would be in more or less the same boat. No matter how good your eyes there will always be a chart in which you can only see to the fifth line eventually. But I took this to mean that even with glasses I would always have less than perfect vision. It was only last year that I was told that with my glasses on I had 20/20 vision. I actually had to ask the optometrist to repeat that to me. I had always ‘known’ that my eyesight was so bad, even with glasses on, that it was less than ‘normal’. So her telling me that was not (and had not been) the case completely threw me. The point being that I’ve never quite known what ‘normal’ might be, but I had always just assumed that normal was something different from what I could actually see. To find out that I am, in fact, Mr Normal came as quite a surprise.
This book is about seeing. For those of us who can see there seems to be nothing more normal in the world. And those of us who can see generally can think of nothing worse than not being able to see. The choice between being dead and being blind seems, in so many ways, quite a difficult choice to make in theory. But what is very interesting in this book is that while we might well think there is one way to be blind and millions of ways of seeing – in fact, seeing is such a complicated and strange phenomenon that there are even people with no eyes at all who can still ‘see’ in certain senses.
I’m going to have to learn more about dyslexia. A lot of this book is about people with degenerative disorders – strokes and such – that stop them being able to read. Cases where they can see the letters and even see the words, but are no longer able to make any sense of them. These are the kinds of stories that make you think someone is taking the piss. The problem is that the complexity of the task involved in reading is such that highly particular dysfunctions in one part of the brain can lead to highly peculiar behaviours in the person suffering from that dysfunction.
Sacks even has a chapter on his own problem with sight – brought about by a cancer growth in his eye. This is a particularly interesting chapter for a great number of reasons, but not least because he talks about a curious stereo vision thing happening when he was smoking cannabis one night. You might like to google an image of Mr Sacks now for the full implications of this little confession to take effect. I don’t know about you, but he just isn’t the sort of person I would immediately associate with smoking a little blue.
Needing to wear glasses has always made sight seem something of infinite value to me. I remember the first time I looked at my brother’s face after getting them and seeing he had freckles. There was a real sense that I had never really seen his face before. Or the time I first wore contact lenses and how sharp and clear my focus was looking over the Alexandra Gardens in a 64 tram down St Kilda Road – but the pain of them proved too much for me to bother with despite the manifest improvement in sight they gave. Anyway, I look naked without glasses on, and, oddly enough, generally I am.
There is an article here about a women who got stereo vision quite late on in life. There is some evidence that many artists did not have stereo vision (they can tell by looking at photos of them and making measurements of their eyes) and so they saw the world as a flat two-dimensional plane. This woman would sit for hours fascinated by the sense of depth, of how things jumped out at her into the third dimension she had never known existed before. I really could identify with this woman in my own small way.
Sacks does some name dropping in this book, but not of the boring sort of thick actress or member of the royal family others do – but people I would give my right arm to have known. He mentions writing to the Russian psychologist Luria at one point (someone who has become a bit of a hero to me), he also mentions a tall guy called Jonathan Miller (who I assume is THE Jonathan Miller and who has always been one of my heroes) and then in passing mentions that he wrote to Simon Winchester to congratulate him on one of his talking books.
Now, I’m going to end in a second, but I wanted to talk about talking books for a bit first. Sacks says he doesn’t generally like them. He talks of a blind woman in this book who finds her eyes get tired when she listens to them. She visually constructs the text in her head that she is listening to and effectively reads along with the voice. I don’t do anything like this. I listen to talking books for hours of every day – while I drive, while I cook, while I walk to the station. They are my constant companions. People have mentioned to me that they are only meant for the blind or the illiterate – something that makes we feel very sorry for them.
Sacks talks about visualisation and how this might well be the third great cognitive ability, he says he is following Colin McGinn (the philosopher) in this. I was thinking of other things when this was mentioned in the book and so missed what the other two were – though I think one of them was making sense of sensual data and maybe the other was linguistic ability – but I could be wrong. Anyway, this got me thinking about visualisation. My ex-wife once told me that I could improve my spelling (always hopeless until my late twenties) by doing what she did. She would just visualise the word in her mind and then copy it onto the paper. She might as well have said, “flying is simple, you just fall at the ground and miss” as Douglas Adams would have it. Marx says somewhere that the difference between a bee making a hive and a person making a house is that even the worst builder making a house has an image in their mind of the final product – the bee does not. Unfortunately, I am that bee. The odd thing is that I’m quite good at connecting visual images – I tend to use images in powerpoint presentations in metaphorical ways, but the thing is that this is in no way natural for me and (as odd as this might sound) in no way ‘visual’ – if you know what I mean. I can’t call up the image, but I will often have a feeling that I can use a certain image to make a certain point, but it is an almost subconscious awareness. In trying to call up, for example, to my mind’s eye now a famous image, say, the Mona Lisa, all I can ever really see is a kind of grey lead pencil tracing of it that fades to white as soon as my concentration is relaxed.
Sight has more to do with the mind than we might like to imagine – and this is a fascinating look at when things go wrong that might just get you wondering about your own visual life. Enjoy.
May 6, 2015
I like all Sacks' books about the neurological problems and adjustments of the people whose stories he tells. However, when he comes to relating his own problems, that's another matter. He goes into far too much detail as though he had confused his audience - most of us are neither personal fans of Oliver Sacks himself (rather than his work) nor are we neurologists ourselves. We just got sucked into neurology-as-a-popular-science by the brilliant Awakenings, or the film of that book starring Robin Williams, who will forever personify Sacks, at least in my mind.
A 3.5 star book (would have been four without the endless meanderings of Sacks as his own subject) and I'm not feeling generous, so three stars. If you enjoy Sacks, you might also enjoy another writer-neurologist, Dr. Harold L. Klawans.
A 3.5 star book (would have been four without the endless meanderings of Sacks as his own subject) and I'm not feeling generous, so three stars. If you enjoy Sacks, you might also enjoy another writer-neurologist, Dr. Harold L. Klawans.
January 3, 2022
كتابي الاول لهذا العام ومن حسن حظي فهو كتاب لطبيبي المفضل ومثلي الاعلي عبقري المخ والأعصاب الطبيب اوليفر ساكس
ان تجمع بين كونك كاتب بأسلوب رائع وطبيب عبقري يتعامل مع الحالات بشكل احترافي ويشخص الأمراض المعقدة المتعلقة بالعقل البشري والأعصاب فهو شئ مستحيل ولكن هناك استثناء لا يعرف المستحيل وهو العبقري اوليفر ساكس
يتحدث الكتاب عن العضو المعقد وهو الدماغ البشري وقدرته المذهلة علي التكيف والتغلب علي الإعاقة من خلال مشاركة دراسة لحالات تعلموا التعويض والتكيف بعد تعرضهم للاضطرابات العصبية
وكالعادة كما اعتدنا من اوليفر ساكس في كتبه فهو ليس الطبيب فقط بل مريض أيضا
يحكي عن قصته وتعرضه لسرطان في عينه وفقدان البصر في احدث عينيه وتعرضه لعدم التعرف علي الوجود مدي حياته
ان تجمع بين كونك كاتب بأسلوب رائع وطبيب عبقري يتعامل مع الحالات بشكل احترافي ويشخص الأمراض المعقدة المتعلقة بالعقل البشري والأعصاب فهو شئ مستحيل ولكن هناك استثناء لا يعرف المستحيل وهو العبقري اوليفر ساكس
يتحدث الكتاب عن العضو المعقد وهو الدماغ البشري وقدرته المذهلة علي التكيف والتغلب علي الإعاقة من خلال مشاركة دراسة لحالات تعلموا التعويض والتكيف بعد تعرضهم للاضطرابات العصبية
وكالعادة كما اعتدنا من اوليفر ساكس في كتبه فهو ليس الطبيب فقط بل مريض أيضا
يحكي عن قصته وتعرضه لسرطان في عينه وفقدان البصر في احدث عينيه وتعرضه لعدم التعرف علي الوجود مدي حياته
January 2, 2019
In a review by “The Guardian” it alludes “we are all close to being someone else.” The 3 lb. mass---aka the brain---is explored fully with Dr. Sacks and thus the opaque is made pellucid. Even now posthumous author Sacks humble words and melodic British accent resonates in my ear (via audible) and "The Mind’s Eye” embodied ichor.
My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine. Seeing patients, listening to them...questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
— Oliver Sacks, MD
Reading and listening (via audible) to “The Mind’s Eye” on cases regarding agnosia to prosopagnosia (Dr. P) and patients that seem to imitate “hunchback of Notre dame” characters. Dr. Oliver Sacks has a “au courant” sense of observation—as we discover from his written patient records. One engaging case was Lilian Kallir (concert pianist).
Some would describe Dr. Sacks as man with a Santa Claus beard, yet after witnessing Sacks “writing his notes on his arm” such characteristics embody the human spirit of his genius. “The Mind’s Eye” does not scream and it instructs gently---like the brush of a butterfly wing on bare skin. Brilliant! Buy and read.
My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine. Seeing patients, listening to them...questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
— Oliver Sacks, MD
Reading and listening (via audible) to “The Mind’s Eye” on cases regarding agnosia to prosopagnosia (Dr. P) and patients that seem to imitate “hunchback of Notre dame” characters. Dr. Oliver Sacks has a “au courant” sense of observation—as we discover from his written patient records. One engaging case was Lilian Kallir (concert pianist).
Some would describe Dr. Sacks as man with a Santa Claus beard, yet after witnessing Sacks “writing his notes on his arm” such characteristics embody the human spirit of his genius. “The Mind’s Eye” does not scream and it instructs gently---like the brush of a butterfly wing on bare skin. Brilliant! Buy and read.
February 23, 2021
The first book by Oliver Sacks that I read was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. That was a long time ago, and I was young enough that the stories, while fascinating, were abstractions to me. But now, older if not necessarily wiser, when reading The Mind’s Eye I was thinking, “Oh great, more things that can go wrong, including parts of our brains starting to atrophy, progressively and incurably. What else is the universe going to throw at us?”
This book is about people who lose one of their senses, how it affects them, and the sometimes remarkable compensatory abilities they develop. After suffering a devastating loss it would be understandable if they were to sink into deep depression, but these people are fighters, inspirational in their determination to carry on. Also inspiring is the hard work of their therapists, including a woman who is herself quadriplegic, but developed an ingenious method for people who have lost the ability to read and write to communicate with those around them.
To those on Goodreads reading is a large part of who we are, and not being able to read would be like not being able to see. We learned to read at such a young age that to us it seems like the most natural thing in the world: we look at words and meaning floods into our minds. It is never actually that simple. Evolution may have wired our brains for speech, but reading and writing (which are two different skills) are too recent for natural selection to have adapted them. Brain scans show that reading is a distributed process in our brains, taking place in a number of different areas which were originally used for other things but have been repurposed for literacy. As Sacks says, “We think of reading as a seamless and indivisible act, and as we read we attend to the meaning and perhaps the beauty of written language, unconscious of the many processes that make this possible. One has to encounter a condition [resulting in its loss] to realize that reading is, in fact, dependent on a whole hierarchy or cascade of processes, which can break down at any point.” (p. 50)
The key word here is aphasia, an inability to comprehend language, and it is not an extremely rare condition. “Aphasia is not uncommon: it has been estimated that one person in three hundred may have a lasting aphasia from brain damage, whether as the consequence of a stroke, a head injury, a tumor, or a degenerative brain disease.” (p. 32)
One of the case studies in this book involves a writer who woke up one morning and found that a stroke had left him aphastic. Initially he could look at letters and know they were letters, but they appeared to be in some incomprehensible alphabet. Later, through hard work and therapy he regained the ability to recognize individual letters and then, with great difficulty, to piece them together into words. He even managed to work around his loss and write more books, a tribute to his determination.
Not all of the chapters in this book are about Sacks’ patients. He also discusses his own limitations in perceiving the world, one of them neurological, and the other physical. He had a lifelong case of severe prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize faces. His own assistant, who worked for him for years and whom he saw almost every day, would have been unrecognizable if he were to pass her on the street. There are certainly worse conditions to have, but how odd it must be to exist in a world where everyone is a stranger, always living among a sea of anonymous faces.
His other disability resulted from melanoma in his right eye. Surgery to correct it left him with only peripheral vision, and then later, bleeding from the surgery caused him to lose sight entirely in that eye. He gives a cautionary reminder to his readers that he had skipped his annual eye exams for almost three years, and had thus missed the opportunity to find the tumor when it was smaller and might have been treatable with less severe consequences.
His loss of vision in one eye left him without the ability to see in three dimensions. People like him see the world as flat, and he uses a good example when he describes seeing himself in the mirror; his image did not appear to be behind the glass, but on it, with no depth of field. As I read about this, I found myself looking around the room, noting how normal everything looked: the clock, the windows, the lamp, all in their proper places, all automatically placed in my mind’s eye at their respective distances, and then I noted that this was all just a representation of reality that my brain had constructed, and which could be interrupted or lost at any time.
I would have liked for Sacks to have spent more time exploring what we know of healthy brains based on damaged ones. He occasionally makes remarks about how we interpret the world around us that made me want to learn more, such as, “The recognition of representations may require a sort of learning, the grasping of a code or convention, beyond that needed for the recognition of objects. Thus, it is said, people from primitive cultures who have never been exposed to photographs may fail to recognize that they are representations of something else.” (p. 18) That is a fascinating idea, and made me want to look for a book that expands on the idea of how the mind constructs coherent models of reality.
This book is about people who lose one of their senses, how it affects them, and the sometimes remarkable compensatory abilities they develop. After suffering a devastating loss it would be understandable if they were to sink into deep depression, but these people are fighters, inspirational in their determination to carry on. Also inspiring is the hard work of their therapists, including a woman who is herself quadriplegic, but developed an ingenious method for people who have lost the ability to read and write to communicate with those around them.
To those on Goodreads reading is a large part of who we are, and not being able to read would be like not being able to see. We learned to read at such a young age that to us it seems like the most natural thing in the world: we look at words and meaning floods into our minds. It is never actually that simple. Evolution may have wired our brains for speech, but reading and writing (which are two different skills) are too recent for natural selection to have adapted them. Brain scans show that reading is a distributed process in our brains, taking place in a number of different areas which were originally used for other things but have been repurposed for literacy. As Sacks says, “We think of reading as a seamless and indivisible act, and as we read we attend to the meaning and perhaps the beauty of written language, unconscious of the many processes that make this possible. One has to encounter a condition [resulting in its loss] to realize that reading is, in fact, dependent on a whole hierarchy or cascade of processes, which can break down at any point.” (p. 50)
The key word here is aphasia, an inability to comprehend language, and it is not an extremely rare condition. “Aphasia is not uncommon: it has been estimated that one person in three hundred may have a lasting aphasia from brain damage, whether as the consequence of a stroke, a head injury, a tumor, or a degenerative brain disease.” (p. 32)
One of the case studies in this book involves a writer who woke up one morning and found that a stroke had left him aphastic. Initially he could look at letters and know they were letters, but they appeared to be in some incomprehensible alphabet. Later, through hard work and therapy he regained the ability to recognize individual letters and then, with great difficulty, to piece them together into words. He even managed to work around his loss and write more books, a tribute to his determination.
Not all of the chapters in this book are about Sacks’ patients. He also discusses his own limitations in perceiving the world, one of them neurological, and the other physical. He had a lifelong case of severe prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize faces. His own assistant, who worked for him for years and whom he saw almost every day, would have been unrecognizable if he were to pass her on the street. There are certainly worse conditions to have, but how odd it must be to exist in a world where everyone is a stranger, always living among a sea of anonymous faces.
His other disability resulted from melanoma in his right eye. Surgery to correct it left him with only peripheral vision, and then later, bleeding from the surgery caused him to lose sight entirely in that eye. He gives a cautionary reminder to his readers that he had skipped his annual eye exams for almost three years, and had thus missed the opportunity to find the tumor when it was smaller and might have been treatable with less severe consequences.
His loss of vision in one eye left him without the ability to see in three dimensions. People like him see the world as flat, and he uses a good example when he describes seeing himself in the mirror; his image did not appear to be behind the glass, but on it, with no depth of field. As I read about this, I found myself looking around the room, noting how normal everything looked: the clock, the windows, the lamp, all in their proper places, all automatically placed in my mind’s eye at their respective distances, and then I noted that this was all just a representation of reality that my brain had constructed, and which could be interrupted or lost at any time.
I would have liked for Sacks to have spent more time exploring what we know of healthy brains based on damaged ones. He occasionally makes remarks about how we interpret the world around us that made me want to learn more, such as, “The recognition of representations may require a sort of learning, the grasping of a code or convention, beyond that needed for the recognition of objects. Thus, it is said, people from primitive cultures who have never been exposed to photographs may fail to recognize that they are representations of something else.” (p. 18) That is a fascinating idea, and made me want to look for a book that expands on the idea of how the mind constructs coherent models of reality.
April 7, 2021
São verdadeiras histórias de «terror» as que Oliver Sacks conta [incluindo, também, a sua própria história]. Compreendemos que o cérebro é o nosso grande mentor e que dependemos demasiado dele. Um dia, acordamos e o mundo é um lugar diferente. Há quem acorde e não consiga, nunca mais, ler! Além de neurologista, Sacks é um excelente contador de histórias. Todos os pacientes são descritos com muita ternura e vulnerabilidade; descobrimos, ainda, que o ser humano consegue adaptar-se a todas as situações.
Sacks refere as palavras de uma paciente(que perdeu quase na totalidade a capacidade de ler música e tocar piano) que, enquanto executa com muito esforço um quarteto de Haydn, diz: «tudo está perdoado.»
E assim a vida continua.
Um bom livro. Quero muito ler mais obras deste autor.
Sacks refere as palavras de uma paciente(que perdeu quase na totalidade a capacidade de ler música e tocar piano) que, enquanto executa com muito esforço um quarteto de Haydn, diz: «tudo está perdoado.»
E assim a vida continua.
Um bom livro. Quero muito ler mais obras deste autor.
May 22, 2021
With the exception of his early, rather dry 'Awakenings', Sacks' writing has become exceptionally good. He manages in each of his books to educate the reader by means of engaging stories--'case studies' actually, one of which in this book is about himself. He also conveys something of the mysteries of our human being, often in terms of debates within the neurosciences as they relate to the cases he describes: what of free will? how localized, how distributed are various mental functions? what of behaviorism?--and, often thanks to copious notes, he manages to give something of a historical context to these controversies.
November 18, 2010
When I first saw the cover of this book, I thought it was called "O, Liver Sacks". It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out it was called "The Mind's Eye". I loved the case studies in this book, and most of all how the people were portrayed as humans, not patients. My favorite chapter was probably the one on Lillian. The chapter on Oliver Sacks's eye cancer was really depressing, but it was still good. I definitely want to read more of this author.
Favorite parts:
"Lillian could still identify objects by inference, using her intact perception of color, shape, texture, and movement, along with her memory and intelligence. Dr. P could not. He could not, for instance, identify a glove by sight or feel (despite being able to describe it in almost absurdly abstract terms, as 'a continuous surface infolded on itself [with] five outpouchings, if this is the word... a container of some sort?')-- until, by accident, he got it on his hand." (pg 18)
"Changizi et al. have found similar topological invariants in a range of natural settings, and this has led them to hypothesize that the shapes of letters 'have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms." (pg 74) I read a linguistics book that said something like this, too, and how shorthand is hard to read because it's not made up of contours found in nature.
"(It makes me think back to the radioactive clock dials my Uncle Abe used to make, and how I would press these against my closed eyelids as a child and see similar scintillations...could this have played a part in causing my tumor?)" (pgs 156, 157)
Favorite parts:
"Lillian could still identify objects by inference, using her intact perception of color, shape, texture, and movement, along with her memory and intelligence. Dr. P could not. He could not, for instance, identify a glove by sight or feel (despite being able to describe it in almost absurdly abstract terms, as 'a continuous surface infolded on itself [with] five outpouchings, if this is the word... a container of some sort?')-- until, by accident, he got it on his hand." (pg 18)
"Changizi et al. have found similar topological invariants in a range of natural settings, and this has led them to hypothesize that the shapes of letters 'have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms." (pg 74) I read a linguistics book that said something like this, too, and how shorthand is hard to read because it's not made up of contours found in nature.
"(It makes me think back to the radioactive clock dials my Uncle Abe used to make, and how I would press these against my closed eyelids as a child and see similar scintillations...could this have played a part in causing my tumor?)" (pgs 156, 157)
March 28, 2025
This is my first Oliver Sacks and a pleasant introduction indeed. I was attracted to reading one of his works for some time and decided to start with this one, about our visual relation to the world around us.
The book is a series of essays about real life cases who lost their eye sight and how they (actually their brains) learned to find different sensory replacements to fill in for the missing eye visual with a different set of inputs allowing the blind to 'see' the world from a different perspective.
While the fact that some artists and intellectuals had their talents unlocked by blindness was already known to me as a more generic form of being deprived of one or more blessings might open the door for oneself to rediscover their new potential. Yet, I was astounded to learn that some people actually were able to almost completely compensate for the lost sight with other senses being able to lead an almost normal life at par with visually gifted people.
The second half of the book deals with Oliver's own testament to his visual problems leading loosing his 3D perspective and being almost entrapped in a flat 2D world, and more complications coming from a tumor in his right eye, showing deep perspective on how it affected him and his daily life, learning to appreciate what he really had.
The book also identifies the fact that sight in itself is not the whole package contrasting with cases who suffer, after a stroke, from loss of meaning to what they see like looking at an apple and not being able to know what you're looking at although you see it. Being able to decipher what you see is actually as important as being able to see at all.
A good book and I think I will read more of his work in the future,
MiM
The book is a series of essays about real life cases who lost their eye sight and how they (actually their brains) learned to find different sensory replacements to fill in for the missing eye visual with a different set of inputs allowing the blind to 'see' the world from a different perspective.
While the fact that some artists and intellectuals had their talents unlocked by blindness was already known to me as a more generic form of being deprived of one or more blessings might open the door for oneself to rediscover their new potential. Yet, I was astounded to learn that some people actually were able to almost completely compensate for the lost sight with other senses being able to lead an almost normal life at par with visually gifted people.
The second half of the book deals with Oliver's own testament to his visual problems leading loosing his 3D perspective and being almost entrapped in a flat 2D world, and more complications coming from a tumor in his right eye, showing deep perspective on how it affected him and his daily life, learning to appreciate what he really had.
The book also identifies the fact that sight in itself is not the whole package contrasting with cases who suffer, after a stroke, from loss of meaning to what they see like looking at an apple and not being able to know what you're looking at although you see it. Being able to decipher what you see is actually as important as being able to see at all.
A good book and I think I will read more of his work in the future,
MiM
July 3, 2011
Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, The Mind's Eye is a collection of case studies by neurologist Oliver Sacks (who is perhaps best known for his bringing Temple Grandin, an extremely successful woman with autism to the attention of the public and for the film with Robin Williams based on his book Awakenings).
Sacks is both a gifted writer and a gifted clinician who brings a warmth, compassion and genuine interest to people who have various disabilities as the result of illness or trauma to the brain. Each essay describes a person coping with some highly unusual ailment-a musician who can no longer read music, or words, but can still write, a woman who loses the ability to use or understand language, a writer who can't read, the loss of stereoscopic vision.
What Sacks brings to the studies, beyond his excellent prose and skill at accurately and vividly bringing these individuals (and their families) to life) is an almost heart-breaking warmth and compassion. He is as interested in the ways in which people learn to cope, the skills they develop to compensate for their losses as he is in their disability. More so, in fact.
Sacks' last essay is his most personal: what happens when a person's vision is reduced to monoscopic vision as the result of cancer. And he writes particularly poignantly in this essay since the patient is himself.
His respect for people is what comes through most strongly. And as painful and frightening as I found some of these studies (these people could be any one of us, including myself, including him), I was also heartened by the courage shown in impossibly difficult situations.
One of the patients, a writer afflicted with alexia-the inabiity to read-said it beautifully:
"The problems never went away. I just got cleverer at solving them."
Sacks is both a gifted writer and a gifted clinician who brings a warmth, compassion and genuine interest to people who have various disabilities as the result of illness or trauma to the brain. Each essay describes a person coping with some highly unusual ailment-a musician who can no longer read music, or words, but can still write, a woman who loses the ability to use or understand language, a writer who can't read, the loss of stereoscopic vision.
What Sacks brings to the studies, beyond his excellent prose and skill at accurately and vividly bringing these individuals (and their families) to life) is an almost heart-breaking warmth and compassion. He is as interested in the ways in which people learn to cope, the skills they develop to compensate for their losses as he is in their disability. More so, in fact.
Sacks' last essay is his most personal: what happens when a person's vision is reduced to monoscopic vision as the result of cancer. And he writes particularly poignantly in this essay since the patient is himself.
His respect for people is what comes through most strongly. And as painful and frightening as I found some of these studies (these people could be any one of us, including myself, including him), I was also heartened by the courage shown in impossibly difficult situations.
One of the patients, a writer afflicted with alexia-the inabiity to read-said it beautifully:
"The problems never went away. I just got cleverer at solving them."
September 21, 2023
هذا الكاتب لا أملُّ من كتبه إطلاقًا، ممتعة إمتاعًا منقطع النظير.
December 3, 2010
I just wrote a blog post about my school memories and how deafness affected my school experience, and one paragraph seemed particularly relevant to this book, so I'll repost it here:
My favorite part of these school trips was the ride [to the audiologist]. The car we rode in was large, at least to my mind, and the back seat faced backwards. Even as a kid I enjoyed other perspectives; I would hang upside down off the jungle gym to see what everything looked like upside down, and purposefully choose other seats on the opposite side of my classroom every once in awhile to see what small things were different over there. So, riding backwards in a car going forwards was absolutely fascinating to me.
I soak up visual stuff, I really do. A lot of deaf people tend to do that, particularly if they were deafened prelingually (I fall right on the cusp; I likely had mild hearing loss as I learned to comprehend speech, but not the profound loss I have now). I love photography and the way computer editing can transform a photo from what the subject looks like in real life. I love different perspectives, as I mentioned above. I absolutely cannot stand when I can only hear something and not look at it, and television programs or college lectures that simply feature one person sitting there talking easily put me to sleep.
This book made me panicky. Seriously. Oliver Sacks has a chapter in here about how he grappled with the possibility of total blindness, and has to deal with monoscopic vision. The last chapter is about how blind people create a world of sight within them, drawing on previous experiences and what they can touch. The rest of the book follows the same theme of how the brain interprets what we see and how it can fail. Oh, man, I did not want to be thinking about the possibility of not being able to see. No hearing? No big deal. Whatevs. No sight? Panic attack.
Since the book evoked a strong reaction in me, I liked it; I don't care what the reaction was. At times it could get a bit dry. One paragraph would be easily readable and relatable and the next would be filled with scientific terminology and buzzwords. I appreciate that Sacks has a large collection of correspondence people have sent to him, telling them their own experiences with various neurological occurences. At times, though, I think the people who write to him are prone to exaggerate, to try to sound interesting. I hope he doesn't take everything at face value, but it doesn't seem like he does.
I didn't realize that Sacks was as old as he is. He's in his seventies, at the time of this writing. I do hope he is able to share many more of his experiences.
My favorite part of these school trips was the ride [to the audiologist]. The car we rode in was large, at least to my mind, and the back seat faced backwards. Even as a kid I enjoyed other perspectives; I would hang upside down off the jungle gym to see what everything looked like upside down, and purposefully choose other seats on the opposite side of my classroom every once in awhile to see what small things were different over there. So, riding backwards in a car going forwards was absolutely fascinating to me.
I soak up visual stuff, I really do. A lot of deaf people tend to do that, particularly if they were deafened prelingually (I fall right on the cusp; I likely had mild hearing loss as I learned to comprehend speech, but not the profound loss I have now). I love photography and the way computer editing can transform a photo from what the subject looks like in real life. I love different perspectives, as I mentioned above. I absolutely cannot stand when I can only hear something and not look at it, and television programs or college lectures that simply feature one person sitting there talking easily put me to sleep.
This book made me panicky. Seriously. Oliver Sacks has a chapter in here about how he grappled with the possibility of total blindness, and has to deal with monoscopic vision. The last chapter is about how blind people create a world of sight within them, drawing on previous experiences and what they can touch. The rest of the book follows the same theme of how the brain interprets what we see and how it can fail. Oh, man, I did not want to be thinking about the possibility of not being able to see. No hearing? No big deal. Whatevs. No sight? Panic attack.
Since the book evoked a strong reaction in me, I liked it; I don't care what the reaction was. At times it could get a bit dry. One paragraph would be easily readable and relatable and the next would be filled with scientific terminology and buzzwords. I appreciate that Sacks has a large collection of correspondence people have sent to him, telling them their own experiences with various neurological occurences. At times, though, I think the people who write to him are prone to exaggerate, to try to sound interesting. I hope he doesn't take everything at face value, but it doesn't seem like he does.
I didn't realize that Sacks was as old as he is. He's in his seventies, at the time of this writing. I do hope he is able to share many more of his experiences.
November 19, 2010
Mind's Eye is classic Sacks. It's a collection of essays with a focus on case studies. This time they were loosely based around the theme of the Mind's Eye - or how our perceptions of the world translate to imagery in the mind. As usual, he looks at people who have some sort of injury, illness or deficit to tell us about the normal functioning processes.
Sacks has never shied away from including his own illnesses and problems in his books. (To wit: A Leg to Stand On and Migraine.) This time felt brutally personal as he shared both his life-long problem with prosopagnosia (face blindness), and his recent battle with a melanoma tumor on his retina. The latter altered then robbed him of his sight, and we see the normally upbeat the resilient doctor become alarmed, depressed, anxious and doubting. His Melanoma Diary is included verbatim, describing his thoughts as his vision changed day-to-day through the cancer treatments.
The last chapter, which was also titled "Mind's Eye", is very detailed, filled with citations, and had more of a scholarly and philosophical tone than the other case-study/memoir chapters. However, it really brought together the deeper themes in the book: the difference between perception and mental imagery. I suspect this chapter has been published elsewhere before inclusion in the book.
One of the best things I took away from the book is the difference between people who are strong visual imagers and people who do a more abstract type of mental imagery. In that last chapter, he discusses quite a few cases of blind people who have either maintained a very strong sense of visual imagery despite their deficits. He contrasts those with cases where the blind person has completely shifted their mental imagery towards aural, texture, and more abstract imagery. (It turns out Sacks admits he has almost no capabilities to pull up mental visual images, and he attributes some of this to his prosopagnosia.)
It took me a long time to think about the differences, but I think there are strong parallels with my fellow physicists. At work, I have always been a very strong visual, "graph it" person -- I think best about a physical relationship or concept if I can imagine the graph or other physical representation. My husband, at the other extreme, likes to think much more abstractly in equations, and rarely graphs things in his head. As I've chatted with other folks over the years, physicists tend to fall into one or the other category - and I think this is what Sacks is talking about in the last chapter.
Sacks has never shied away from including his own illnesses and problems in his books. (To wit: A Leg to Stand On and Migraine.) This time felt brutally personal as he shared both his life-long problem with prosopagnosia (face blindness), and his recent battle with a melanoma tumor on his retina. The latter altered then robbed him of his sight, and we see the normally upbeat the resilient doctor become alarmed, depressed, anxious and doubting. His Melanoma Diary is included verbatim, describing his thoughts as his vision changed day-to-day through the cancer treatments.
The last chapter, which was also titled "Mind's Eye", is very detailed, filled with citations, and had more of a scholarly and philosophical tone than the other case-study/memoir chapters. However, it really brought together the deeper themes in the book: the difference between perception and mental imagery. I suspect this chapter has been published elsewhere before inclusion in the book.
One of the best things I took away from the book is the difference between people who are strong visual imagers and people who do a more abstract type of mental imagery. In that last chapter, he discusses quite a few cases of blind people who have either maintained a very strong sense of visual imagery despite their deficits. He contrasts those with cases where the blind person has completely shifted their mental imagery towards aural, texture, and more abstract imagery. (It turns out Sacks admits he has almost no capabilities to pull up mental visual images, and he attributes some of this to his prosopagnosia.)
It took me a long time to think about the differences, but I think there are strong parallels with my fellow physicists. At work, I have always been a very strong visual, "graph it" person -- I think best about a physical relationship or concept if I can imagine the graph or other physical representation. My husband, at the other extreme, likes to think much more abstractly in equations, and rarely graphs things in his head. As I've chatted with other folks over the years, physicists tend to fall into one or the other category - and I think this is what Sacks is talking about in the last chapter.
January 30, 2014
These latest fascinatingly annotated case histories from Sacks are as ever made wonderful by the rich and tenderly observed personal context of each patient. Most poignantly, he writes of his own experiences of lifelong prosopagnosia (poor facial recognition and sense of direction) and the distressing loss of his stereoscopy due to cancer.
Moving and at times painful, this book is as compulsively readable as Sacks' first publication, illustrating how endlessly wonderful and strange is the half-mysterious country of the mind. In this work the theme of visual perception is mined, starting from alexia and proceeding to the surprisingly diverse visual experiences of blindness.
Moving and at times painful, this book is as compulsively readable as Sacks' first publication, illustrating how endlessly wonderful and strange is the half-mysterious country of the mind. In this work the theme of visual perception is mined, starting from alexia and proceeding to the surprisingly diverse visual experiences of blindness.
July 28, 2021
Mielenkiintoinen kirja aisteista, niiden menettämisestä ja aivojen mukautumiskyvystä. Täytyy tutustua myös kirjailijan muihin teoksiin. Välillä keskittymiskyky herpaantui kirjaa lukiessa, jolloin osa asioista meni ohi. Varsinkin viimeinen kirjoitus meni osittain ohi, tuntui että lopussa osa asioista vähän puuroutui keskenään. 3,75 tähteä
May 14, 2025
Oliver Sacks is always a delight to read. He writes about real people grappling with problems so obscure and situations so off-the-wall, they outdo fiction. His writing reflects a man who is intelligent, well-read, cultured, and decent. But his most attractive trait must be his capacity to look, listen, and observe. And to immerse himself in the world of his subject, with us along for the ride as we imagine what it must feel like to be unable to recognize faces (prosopagnosia*), or have the ability to assign colors to numbers, letters, or words (synesthesia).
It's uncanny how Sacks's subjects practically write the book for him. I marvel most at the resilience and brilliance of someone like Hungarian-Australian psychologist/philosopher Zoltan Torey, blinded in the wink of an eye at the age of twenty-one, and yet had it in him to single-handedly replace the entire roof guttering of his multi-gabled home, causing "the great alarm of his neighbors at seeing a blind man alone on the roof of his house--at night (even though, of course, darkness made no difference to him)." Torey's father was the head of a motion picture company, who exposed his son to scripts, films, and an intellectual crowd at a young age. "The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to engulf my face and change my life. It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of the drumface, less than a foot away. This was the final scene, the slender thread that ties me to my visual past." If it were not for Oliver Sacks, I would never have known of Zoltan Torey, polymath.
*Oliver Sacks himself suffered from a mild case of prosopagnosia, a fact I don't recall reading about in his other books. In fact, among the handful of Sacks's books I've read so far, this has the distinction of being the most personal, as he documents his discovery of and early battle with ocular melanoma, the cancer that would eventually metastasize to his liver and lead to his death in 2015.
It's uncanny how Sacks's subjects practically write the book for him. I marvel most at the resilience and brilliance of someone like Hungarian-Australian psychologist/philosopher Zoltan Torey, blinded in the wink of an eye at the age of twenty-one, and yet had it in him to single-handedly replace the entire roof guttering of his multi-gabled home, causing "the great alarm of his neighbors at seeing a blind man alone on the roof of his house--at night (even though, of course, darkness made no difference to him)." Torey's father was the head of a motion picture company, who exposed his son to scripts, films, and an intellectual crowd at a young age. "The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to engulf my face and change my life. It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of the drumface, less than a foot away. This was the final scene, the slender thread that ties me to my visual past." If it were not for Oliver Sacks, I would never have known of Zoltan Torey, polymath.
*Oliver Sacks himself suffered from a mild case of prosopagnosia, a fact I don't recall reading about in his other books. In fact, among the handful of Sacks's books I've read so far, this has the distinction of being the most personal, as he documents his discovery of and early battle with ocular melanoma, the cancer that would eventually metastasize to his liver and lead to his death in 2015.
February 12, 2020
A fascinating read on the many ways our brain experiencing the visual world. The book includes several case studies: a musician's amazing adaptation after losing the ability of recognizing words later identifying visual objects caused by neurodegeneration; the story of Howard Engel, a writer who lost the ability of reading after a stroke and how he managed to continue to write; a patient who gained three-dimensional vision after not having it for many years; Oliver Sack's own story of suffering melanoma in one eye.
The chapter about prosopagnosia is an eye-opening to me. The last chapter about the brain's inner vision is another favorite chapter of mine.
The chapter about prosopagnosia is an eye-opening to me. The last chapter about the brain's inner vision is another favorite chapter of mine.
April 14, 2011
I'm always impressed by the author's compassion for his patients. One of them has perfect vision but also has a brain disorder that means she can no longer recognize specific objects. She can see an apple, but she isn't sure if it's an apple or a tomato or a pepper. She can see a toy elephant, but it might be a toy dog or a toy giraffe. But she claims to do well in and around her neighborhood. To test this, Sacks takes her grocery shopping . . . and to make sure she doesn't get confused about who or where he is, he dresses from head to toe in red. Who else would think of this?
I also liked his account of the mystery novelist who had a stroke and lost the ability to read but not to write. The novelist relearned reading by tracing the letters in his mouth with his tongue (!) and went on to write another novel and a memoir.
Because Sacks's eyesight is worsening, he's become drawn to cases that are related to vision. I know some reviewers didn't like this part of the book because so much of the focus is on him, but I didn't mind. It makes sense to me that he's trying to understand how different people react to and experience blindness, since he may soon be blind himself.
I also liked his account of the mystery novelist who had a stroke and lost the ability to read but not to write. The novelist relearned reading by tracing the letters in his mouth with his tongue (!) and went on to write another novel and a memoir.
Because Sacks's eyesight is worsening, he's become drawn to cases that are related to vision. I know some reviewers didn't like this part of the book because so much of the focus is on him, but I didn't mind. It makes sense to me that he's trying to understand how different people react to and experience blindness, since he may soon be blind himself.
July 20, 2011
I read this after reading Trevor McCandless's review. I was fascinated from page one onwards.
Since then I have bored nearly everybody I know by talking about it, lent it to my daughter (who found it just as interesting) and ordered another copy for my mother.
It is not just about eye-brain connections, though it is about that. It is about how different people respond in richly unique ways to sensory perception and sensory deprivation. But it is beautifully written, as simple as can be. Sacks is a natural story teller, but he is equally fascinated by people. He just talks about what they do and how they react. No great scientific theories or judgements. Just observation with humour and compassion.
Beautiful piece of writing.
Since then I have bored nearly everybody I know by talking about it, lent it to my daughter (who found it just as interesting) and ordered another copy for my mother.
It is not just about eye-brain connections, though it is about that. It is about how different people respond in richly unique ways to sensory perception and sensory deprivation. But it is beautifully written, as simple as can be. Sacks is a natural story teller, but he is equally fascinated by people. He just talks about what they do and how they react. No great scientific theories or judgements. Just observation with humour and compassion.
Beautiful piece of writing.
September 1, 2015
Oliver Sacks passed away this week and it is a sad loss to those of us who have enjoyed his books as well as to his friends and family. The Mind's Eye, like several other of his popular books, relates stories of his patients with ingenious adaptations to unusual neurological impairments, such as the lack of depth perception, or face blindness (inability to recognize faces). The second half of the book tells his own story in minute detail, of the melanoma tumor discovered behind his eye in 2005 and his developing blindness in that eye. His intimate journal about the early symptoms, his coping mechanisms as well as his fears of loss show a man with deep curiosity about the world and the bravery to face his mortality yet continue to share his insights into the complexities of the brain.
January 4, 2019
3.2 stars.
After reading The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, I was hungry for more of Oliver Sacks' stories. Liked this book in general. Unlike the other book I mentioned it has a theme ; vision and the loss (visual agnosia) or gain of it. It is really interesting to read about how someone's brain can affect this persons vision and the other way around. The power of the book is the detailed description of thoughts and vision. But because of the theme it got a bit boring in the end and some parts didn't add much. Overall I found the book interesting with some refreshing ideas and stories, but not that many as I expected.
The stories I found interesting were especially the one about a writer who couldn't read (alexia sine agrafia), and so couldn't reread what he had written / find mistakes / know where he stopped last time so he can continue. This is also quite inspiring really, and a thread throughout the whole book; a lot of people find creative ways of living and compensations even though they can't see, have trouble recognizing faces/places (prosopagnosia), have only one eye and therefore can't see depth (monoscopy) or can't distinguish a tomato from a pear.
Some quotes that I found interesting:
--prosopagnosia (face-blindness)
"Many prosopagnosics recognize people by voice, posture, or gait; and of course, context and expectation are paramount - one expects to see one's students at school"
"I can see the eyes, nose, mouth quite clearly but they just don't add up"
"At the club I saw someone strange staring at me and asked the steward who it was. You'll laugh at me. I'd been looking at myself in the mirror."
"i see the lower halves of people in stereoscopic depth, while their upper halves are completely flat and two-dimensional."
"He felt that he had become far more sensitive to others' emotional states since losing his sight, for he was no longer taken in by visual appearances, which most people learn to camouflage."
"Born-blind people with normal hearing don't just hear sounds: they can hear objects"
There are more but I won't include all of them :)
After reading The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, I was hungry for more of Oliver Sacks' stories. Liked this book in general. Unlike the other book I mentioned it has a theme ; vision and the loss (visual agnosia) or gain of it. It is really interesting to read about how someone's brain can affect this persons vision and the other way around. The power of the book is the detailed description of thoughts and vision. But because of the theme it got a bit boring in the end and some parts didn't add much. Overall I found the book interesting with some refreshing ideas and stories, but not that many as I expected.
The stories I found interesting were especially the one about a writer who couldn't read (alexia sine agrafia), and so couldn't reread what he had written / find mistakes / know where he stopped last time so he can continue. This is also quite inspiring really, and a thread throughout the whole book; a lot of people find creative ways of living and compensations even though they can't see, have trouble recognizing faces/places (prosopagnosia), have only one eye and therefore can't see depth (monoscopy) or can't distinguish a tomato from a pear.
Some quotes that I found interesting:
--prosopagnosia (face-blindness)
"Many prosopagnosics recognize people by voice, posture, or gait; and of course, context and expectation are paramount - one expects to see one's students at school"
"I can see the eyes, nose, mouth quite clearly but they just don't add up"
"At the club I saw someone strange staring at me and asked the steward who it was. You'll laugh at me. I'd been looking at myself in the mirror."
"i see the lower halves of people in stereoscopic depth, while their upper halves are completely flat and two-dimensional."
"He felt that he had become far more sensitive to others' emotional states since losing his sight, for he was no longer taken in by visual appearances, which most people learn to camouflage."
"Born-blind people with normal hearing don't just hear sounds: they can hear objects"
There are more but I won't include all of them :)
January 30, 2011
I have this little mental game I play with myself to pass the time - when I'm walking or driving by myself, usually. If it had a name, it would probably be called something lame, like 'Choices'. In it, two or three options for a particular choice are available, and I have to justify to myself why I pick the option I do. It's like debating with myself, I gues, and it goes something like this:
Palmerston North, Wanganui, or Hamilton? (Hamilton)
Taller or thinner? (Taller)
Live to 70 or live to 80? (80)
Live to 80 or live to 90? (80)
Smarter or prettier? (Prettier)
Amputation or paralysis? (Amputation)
Paralysis or head injury? (Depends on the severity)
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist (if you don't know that already - he's up there with Dawkins in the recognisable scientists list, and I don't believe Richard Dawkins has ever been played by Robin Williams). This is Sack's 11th book, most of which are filled with case studies of his patients or correspondents, as he seeks to "show us what is often concealed in health: the complex workings of the brain and its astounding ability to adapt and overcome disability". 'The Mind's Eye', as the title suggests, is focused on brain damage - usually stroke - that leads to visual disorders.
'The Mind's Eye' had me playing a different kind of Choices. Blind or Deaf? (Deaf). Lose your stereoscopic or peripheral vision? (Stereoscopic). Prosopagnosia (inability to recognise faces and/or places) or alexia (inability to read)? (Alexia. Just. Agonisingly.)
It was the case studies of alexia that filled me with horror. I tried to imagine getting up one morning, flipping open the laptop, and not being able to read. Not just not able to piece together the letters of the alphabet, but not even recognising the alphabet. Having those 26 little shapes, so deeply engrained in my brain, appear as unfamiliar as Cyrillic script. Perhaps not only not being able to read, but suddenly, unable to write. Or worse yet, total - global - aphasia: the loss of the ability to process language in anyway, to make sense of words spoken to you, to speak, even, in some cases, to think. Sacks quotes the words of psychologist Scott Moss, who had a stroke at 43 and became aphasic:
'The Mind's Eye' is Sacks' most intimate book yet. Not only does he talk about bis own prosopagnosia (so severe he may not recognise his assistant and friend of 20 years when she's waiting in a cafe for him, or be able to distinguish his face in a window from the face of a man on the other side, or remember how to get to his own house if he deviates from his familar path: qualities that have lead to him being described as everything from pathologically shy to having Aspergers Syndrome). But he devotes a long chapter, 'Persistence of Vision', to excerpts from the journal he kept after a malignant tumour appeared next to his fovea behind his retina in his right eye. The tumour was treated first by inserting a radioactive plaque for several days; then with several lasering sessions; he nonetheless lost his stereoscopic vision (depth perception) and a large chunk of his central vision: after a bleed, his lost his peripheral vision.
It seems a strange thing to say, but sight really matters to Sacks. From childhood (I thoroughly recommend his autobiography of his childhood, 'Uncle Tungsten', my favourite of his books). h has been obsessed with sight in all its manifestations, played out in photography and stereoscopy (he is a member of the New York Stereroscopic Society, a group that gets together to marvel over three-dimensional imaging). 'Persistence of Vision' tracks Sacks' experiences and feelings over several years, from sanguine to panicky to despairing. From the day he first noticed first a fluttering in his vision, and then a scotoma (blind spot), visits an opthamologist and is referred for a later appointment with a surgeon:
Inevitably, self-pity seeps through: at Christmas he looks at the NYT list of people who died in 2005, and wonders if he will appear on the 2006 list. It's not really self-pity, though: it's part of the relentless self-examination he places himself under, tracking each change and quirk (his scotoma is the shape of Australia - “complete with a little bulge in the southeast corner — I thought of this as its Tasmania.”; he learns he can fill it in, with patterns from the carpet, the leaves of a tree, the blue of the sky).
Sacks' case studies have fascinated me since I first read them in my third year at uni, when taking a neuropsychology paper. One of the reasons I dropped psych and stuck with art hsitory is the appalling damage psychologists and scientists have done, often inadvertently (but not always) as they seek to understand the human brain. You can't hurt anyone with art history, I reasoned. Sacks' humaneness though continues to shine though. Recommended, even if you just read the bits about himself.
Palmerston North, Wanganui, or Hamilton? (Hamilton)
Taller or thinner? (Taller)
Live to 70 or live to 80? (80)
Live to 80 or live to 90? (80)
Smarter or prettier? (Prettier)
Amputation or paralysis? (Amputation)
Paralysis or head injury? (Depends on the severity)
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist (if you don't know that already - he's up there with Dawkins in the recognisable scientists list, and I don't believe Richard Dawkins has ever been played by Robin Williams). This is Sack's 11th book, most of which are filled with case studies of his patients or correspondents, as he seeks to "show us what is often concealed in health: the complex workings of the brain and its astounding ability to adapt and overcome disability". 'The Mind's Eye', as the title suggests, is focused on brain damage - usually stroke - that leads to visual disorders.
'The Mind's Eye' had me playing a different kind of Choices. Blind or Deaf? (Deaf). Lose your stereoscopic or peripheral vision? (Stereoscopic). Prosopagnosia (inability to recognise faces and/or places) or alexia (inability to read)? (Alexia. Just. Agonisingly.)
It was the case studies of alexia that filled me with horror. I tried to imagine getting up one morning, flipping open the laptop, and not being able to read. Not just not able to piece together the letters of the alphabet, but not even recognising the alphabet. Having those 26 little shapes, so deeply engrained in my brain, appear as unfamiliar as Cyrillic script. Perhaps not only not being able to read, but suddenly, unable to write. Or worse yet, total - global - aphasia: the loss of the ability to process language in anyway, to make sense of words spoken to you, to speak, even, in some cases, to think. Sacks quotes the words of psychologist Scott Moss, who had a stroke at 43 and became aphasic:
When I awoke next morning in the hospital, I was totally (globally) aphasic. I could understand vaguely what others said to me if it was spoken slowly and represented a very concrete form of action ... I had lost completely the ability to talk, to read and write. I even lost for the first two months the ability to use words internally, that is, in my thinking ... I had also lost the ability to dream. So, for a matter of eight to nine weeks, I lived in a total vacuum of self-produced concepts. ... I could deal only with the immediate present. ... The part of myself that was missing was [the] intellectual aspect - the sine qua non of my personality - those essential elements most important to being a unique individual. ... For a long period of time I looked upon myself as only half a man.
'The Mind's Eye' is Sacks' most intimate book yet. Not only does he talk about bis own prosopagnosia (so severe he may not recognise his assistant and friend of 20 years when she's waiting in a cafe for him, or be able to distinguish his face in a window from the face of a man on the other side, or remember how to get to his own house if he deviates from his familar path: qualities that have lead to him being described as everything from pathologically shy to having Aspergers Syndrome). But he devotes a long chapter, 'Persistence of Vision', to excerpts from the journal he kept after a malignant tumour appeared next to his fovea behind his retina in his right eye. The tumour was treated first by inserting a radioactive plaque for several days; then with several lasering sessions; he nonetheless lost his stereoscopic vision (depth perception) and a large chunk of his central vision: after a bleed, his lost his peripheral vision.
It seems a strange thing to say, but sight really matters to Sacks. From childhood (I thoroughly recommend his autobiography of his childhood, 'Uncle Tungsten', my favourite of his books). h has been obsessed with sight in all its manifestations, played out in photography and stereoscopy (he is a member of the New York Stereroscopic Society, a group that gets together to marvel over three-dimensional imaging). 'Persistence of Vision' tracks Sacks' experiences and feelings over several years, from sanguine to panicky to despairing. From the day he first noticed first a fluttering in his vision, and then a scotoma (blind spot), visits an opthamologist and is referred for a later appointment with a surgeon:
Back at my apartment that evening, testing my right eye, I was startled to see that the horizontal bars on the air conditioner all seemed to be warped, converging and collapsing into one another, while the vertical bars diverged. I cannot remember how I spent the rest of the weekend. I was very restless, I went for long walks, and when I was inside, I paced to and fro. The nights were especially bad - I had to knock myself out with sleeping pills.
Inevitably, self-pity seeps through: at Christmas he looks at the NYT list of people who died in 2005, and wonders if he will appear on the 2006 list. It's not really self-pity, though: it's part of the relentless self-examination he places himself under, tracking each change and quirk (his scotoma is the shape of Australia - “complete with a little bulge in the southeast corner — I thought of this as its Tasmania.”; he learns he can fill it in, with patterns from the carpet, the leaves of a tree, the blue of the sky).
Sacks' case studies have fascinated me since I first read them in my third year at uni, when taking a neuropsychology paper. One of the reasons I dropped psych and stuck with art hsitory is the appalling damage psychologists and scientists have done, often inadvertently (but not always) as they seek to understand the human brain. You can't hurt anyone with art history, I reasoned. Sacks' humaneness though continues to shine though. Recommended, even if you just read the bits about himself.
January 24, 2023
Este livro é verdadeiramente interessante. Oliver Sacks tem sempre a espetacular capacidade de misturar os casos clínicos mais interessantes com reflexões pertinentes.
O foco deste livro é a visão / a falta dela. Inclui capítulos sobre alexia sine agraphia, prosopagnosia, afasia e cegueira estereoscópica.
É espetacular a forma como as pessoas conseguem adaptar e passar a ver o mundo literalmente de forma diferente. É espetacular a forma.como o cérebro humano se adapta.
O ultimo capitulo dá o titulo ao livro: o olho da mente. Junta reflexões e casos de pessoas cegas mas que (algumas) conseguem manter imagens visuais no seu interior. Conseguem ter um olho da mente.
Se quiserem ver um rapaz cego de nascença mas que consegue "ver" através do eco, pesquisem Ben Underwood.
Dei 3 estrelas porque em alguns capítulos ficou demasiado técnico e aborrecido. Acho que se não tivesse tido já Neurologia não teria aproveitado muito.
O foco deste livro é a visão / a falta dela. Inclui capítulos sobre alexia sine agraphia, prosopagnosia, afasia e cegueira estereoscópica.
É espetacular a forma como as pessoas conseguem adaptar e passar a ver o mundo literalmente de forma diferente. É espetacular a forma.como o cérebro humano se adapta.
O ultimo capitulo dá o titulo ao livro: o olho da mente. Junta reflexões e casos de pessoas cegas mas que (algumas) conseguem manter imagens visuais no seu interior. Conseguem ter um olho da mente.
Se quiserem ver um rapaz cego de nascença mas que consegue "ver" através do eco, pesquisem Ben Underwood.
Dei 3 estrelas porque em alguns capítulos ficou demasiado técnico e aborrecido. Acho que se não tivesse tido já Neurologia não teria aproveitado muito.
January 9, 2022
This was a fantastic collection. I liked it quite a bit more than The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. The focus of these essays is more on exploring different people's various struggles with perception without the focus on treatments or cures that the other book has. Overall, I think that will lend to this book ageing a lot better.
Sacks also includes an essay on his own experience with vision loss, including detailed journal entries describing his fears and the ups and downs of the illness. Combined with his personal experience with prosopagnosia and other issues related to vision give him a unique ability to tell these stories empathetically.
Sacks also includes an essay on his own experience with vision loss, including detailed journal entries describing his fears and the ups and downs of the illness. Combined with his personal experience with prosopagnosia and other issues related to vision give him a unique ability to tell these stories empathetically.
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May 3, 2020Oliver Sacks lived one of the very best and fullest and most other-directed lives in human history, and he did so much to show us how irreducibly embodied each experience, each thought, each emotion, each memory, each person is. It is clear from every word that he wrote how each encounter with another person expanded his conception of human experience, and his commitment to honor the ever-increasing variety of being alive. He was an example of openness, curiosity, vulnerability and kindness whom I try to remember and emulate every day.
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September 10, 2025DNF
August 10, 2018
Bu kitabı kabaca ikiye ayırabiliriz. Kitabın ilk bölümünde Oliver Sacks, duyu kaybı veya bozukluğu yaşayan hastalarından bahsediyor. Yazar, agnozi gibi sıradan insanın hayal edemeyeceği ilginç rahatsızlıkları başarıyla analiz ediyor.
İkinci bölümde ise Oliver Sacks, kendi görüşünü kısmen kaybetmesiyle başlayan olayları, tedavi sürecini ve bu süreçte yaşadıklarını bütün ayrıntısıyla anlatıyor. Devamında ise beynin görme kaybına verdiği tepkilerin, algının duyu kaybı halinde ne şekilde değişiyor olabileceğinin yine vakalar üzerinden speküle edildiğini okuyoruz.
Birinci bölümden müthiş keyif aldım. Oliver Sacks çok iyi yaptığı bir işi, vaka analizini bu bölümde de çok iyi yapıyor. Vakalar gerçekten çok ilgi çekici olunca kendisi de sahneyi paylaşmamış, minimum yorum yapmış.
Öte yandan çok yorucu bir ikinci bölüm kitabı iyi bitirmenizi engelliyor. Aşırı detaylı anlatım yüzünden sürekli olarak kayboluyorsunuz. Kitap yer yer spekülasyona kayıyor, deneyimler bombardımanı altında bırakıyor. Ne yazık ki Türkçe çeviri de anlaşılmayı zorlaştırıyor (adil olayım, bu noktada çeviri mi kötüydü, dil mi yetersizdi çok karar veremedim).
Sonuç olarak, Oliver Sacks seviyorsanız ilk tercihlerden olmasa da hızlıca okunacak keyifli bir kitap.
İkinci bölümde ise Oliver Sacks, kendi görüşünü kısmen kaybetmesiyle başlayan olayları, tedavi sürecini ve bu süreçte yaşadıklarını bütün ayrıntısıyla anlatıyor. Devamında ise beynin görme kaybına verdiği tepkilerin, algının duyu kaybı halinde ne şekilde değişiyor olabileceğinin yine vakalar üzerinden speküle edildiğini okuyoruz.
Birinci bölümden müthiş keyif aldım. Oliver Sacks çok iyi yaptığı bir işi, vaka analizini bu bölümde de çok iyi yapıyor. Vakalar gerçekten çok ilgi çekici olunca kendisi de sahneyi paylaşmamış, minimum yorum yapmış.
Öte yandan çok yorucu bir ikinci bölüm kitabı iyi bitirmenizi engelliyor. Aşırı detaylı anlatım yüzünden sürekli olarak kayboluyorsunuz. Kitap yer yer spekülasyona kayıyor, deneyimler bombardımanı altında bırakıyor. Ne yazık ki Türkçe çeviri de anlaşılmayı zorlaştırıyor (adil olayım, bu noktada çeviri mi kötüydü, dil mi yetersizdi çok karar veremedim).
Sonuç olarak, Oliver Sacks seviyorsanız ilk tercihlerden olmasa da hızlıca okunacak keyifli bir kitap.
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