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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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 26, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780307750495
- File size: 252006 KB
- Duration: 08:45:00
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts his diagnosis of an ocular tumor, his treatment, and the eventual loss of most of his vision in that eye. As a result, his world loses dimension and becomes, essentially, flat. Sacks delivers the personal portion of the book. His measured tones and control contrast with the poignancy of his accounts of how he learned to adapt. Sacks also introduces case studies of others who have lost their ability to see, read, or recognize faces as a result of neurological disorders. These are narrated by Richard Davidson, whose careful and steady narrative style matches that of Sacks. J.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from November 8, 2010
Sacks, a neurologist and practicing physician at Columbia University Medical Center, and author of ten popular books on the quirks of the human mind (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) focuses here on creative people who have learned to compensate for potentially devastating disabilities. From the concert pianist who progressively lost the ability to recognize objects (including musical scores) yet managed to keep performing from memory, to the writer whose stroke disturbed his ability to read but not his ability to write (he used his experience to write a novel about a detective suffering from amnesia), to Sacks himself, who suffers from "face blindness," a condition that renders him unable to recognize people, even relatives and, sometimes, himself (he once confused a stranger's face in a window with his own reflection), Sacks finds fascination in the strange workings of the human mind. Written with his trademark insight, compassion, and humor, these seven new tales once again make the obscure and arcane absolutely absorbing.
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