The Mind's Eye

by OliverSacks (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $9.37

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $6.24

  The bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat describes how we experience the visual world. In Musicophilia , Oliver Sacks explored music and the brain; now, in The Mind's Eye , he writes about the myriad ways in which we experience the visual world: how we see in three dimensions; how we recognize individual faces or places; how we use language to communicate verbally; how we translate marks on paper into words and paragraphs, even how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed. Alongside remarkable stories of people who have lost these abilities but adapted with courage, resilience and ingenuity, there is an added, personal element: one day in late 2005, Sacks became aware of a dazzling, flashing light in one part of his visual field; it was not the familiar migraine aura he had experienced since childhood, and just two days later a malignant tumor in one eye was diagnosed. In subsequent journal entries - some of which are included in The Mind's Eye - he chronicled the experience of living with cancer, recording both the effects of the tumor itself, and radiation therapy. In turning himself into a case history, Sacks has given us perhaps his most intimate, impressive and insightful (no pun intended) book yet.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $4.19

  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.