Book description
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
eventually 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, after years of isolation, reinvents herself as an
outgoing and highly social member of her community, although 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 here some very strange paradoxes - people who can see
perfectly but not recognize their own children, blind people who become
hyper-visual, or who navigate by ‘tongue vision’. Along the way, he
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. Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of ten
previous books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
, Awakenings
(which inspired the Oscar-nominated film) and Musicophilia
. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Neurology and
Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is the first, and only, Columbia
University Artist, and is also a Fellow of the Royal College of
Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire.
