The Mind’s Eye

Greg Fearon — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 13:39:55 +0000

“Extraordinary. . . . An elegant mixture of case history and street-level observations of the struggles of those afflicted with visual disorders.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

The Mind’s Eye

“The effects of a profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness may cast an unexpected light on these questions. Going blind, especially later in life, presents one with a huge, potentially overwhelming challenge: to find a new way of living, of ordering one’s world, when the old has been destroyed.” —Oliver Sacks

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 reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and well-loved 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 well 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 5000 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.

The ever-curious Oliver Sacks involved in one of his usual activities—investigation. Photo by Bill Hayes

Praise for The Mind’s Eye

“Is there anyone who’s done more to elucidate the ability in disability than Oliver Sacks?. . . . In Sacks’ world, even with great loss there are fascinating compensations.” —People

“Another masterpiece of phenomenological description by our most gifted and humane chronicler of neurological disorders. . . . Sacks effortlessly blends his teaching of neurology with the most sensitive descriptions of the ways in which our individual brains yield the most extraordinary variety of human experience.” —New Scientist

“Frank and moving. . . . His books resonate because they reveal as much about the force of character as they do about neurology.” —Nature

“Rich with the sort of observation and insight that makes Sacks’s writing satisfying. . . . Sacks shows us knowledge, discipline, and imagination confronting the terrors of illness and loss. . . . Readers may never take the view of a sunrise or of their child’s smile the same way again.” —Boston Globe

“Elaborate and gorgeously detailed. . . . Again and again, Sacks invites readers to imagine their way into minds unlike their own, encouraging a radical form of empathy.” —Los Angeles Times

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An Anthropologist on Mars

Greg Fearon — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 08:30:45 +0000

“An inexhaustible tourist at the farther reaches of the mind, Sacks presents, in sparse, unsentimental prose, the stories of seven of his patients. The result is as rich, vivid and compelling as any collection of short fictional stories.”

— Independent on Sunday

An Anthropologist on Mars

“Back to individuals and their stories again–now explored at a length, and with a depth, beyond that of Hat, though some of the themes–autism, amnesia, Tourette’s syndrome, etc. were the same.” — Oliver Sacks

Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks has written, are travellers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven such travellers– including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette’s Syndrome except when he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who has great difficulty deciphering the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.

These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other modes of being that–however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking–may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office, and Dr. Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far borders of experience.

Along the way, he gives us a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds. In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted–the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of color–Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.

Oliver Sacks and Temple Grandin

Praise for An Anthropologist on Mars

“A multi-faceted masterpiece…a joy to read….Sacks invites hope where hope has been proscribed, an act that by itself makes this book priceless.” —Chicago Tribune

“A wonderful new book [that] hums with emotional and intellectual energy….It is Dr. Sacks’s gift that he has found a way to enlarge our experience and understanding of what the human is.” —Richard Locke, Wall St. Journal

“Engaging…warm…erudite… Sacks is a master at blending science with old fashioned storytelling…he has refined the case-history into an art.” —Time

“Oliver Sacks is a chronicler of possibility. In this rich and penetrating exploration of seven ‘deeply altered selves,’ the author of the bestselling The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and the metaphysical Awakenings opens to the reader doors of perception generally passed through only by those ‘at the far borders of human experience.’” —Boston Sunday Globe

“Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled.” —Mary Ellen Curtin

Inspired by An Anthropologist on Mars

The Music Never Stopped – an independent feature film based on “The Last Hippie,” a story in An Anthropologist on Mars. Starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Julia Ormond, J.K. Simmons, and Cara Seymour. Directed by Jim Kohlberg, from a script by Gwyn Lurie and Gary Marks. Chosen to premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival. Opening in theaters in March 2011. More info here.

Molly Sweeney – a play by Brian Friel inspired in part by “To See and Not See,” a clinical tale in An Anthropologist on Mars. World premiere Gate Theatre, Dublin, August 1994, with Catherine Byrne, Mark Lambert, and T. P. McKenna; U.S. debut January 1996, Roundabout Theater, with Catherine Byrne, Jason Robards, and Alfred Molina.

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Blindness Archives - Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation

The Mind’s Eye

The Mind’s Eye

Praise for The Mind’s Eye

An Anthropologist on Mars

An Anthropologist on Mars

Oliver Sacks and Temple Grandin

Praise for An Anthropologist on Mars

Inspired by An Anthropologist on Mars