The Mind's Eye - Hardcover

Sacks, Oliver

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 033050889X ISBN 13: 9780330508896

Publisher: Picador, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

'With gusto and humanity, Sacks shows that between total blindness and normal vision lies an ocean of strange experience.' --RA Magazine

'His own optical trick is that he has been able to keep one eye on science and one on literature and each, in its way, has dramatically improved the vision of the other.' --Observer

'accessible and engrossing.' --BBC Focus (Science and Technology

'Packed with wisdom, humour, extraordinary human stories and reflections on how we all perceive the world... He ends with a brilliant discussion of blindness and the ways in which blind people develop visual concepts. Heartily recommended.' --Readers Digest

'He manages artfully to combine the particular with the general so that the reader does not ever have the impression that he is reading a mere treatise, and he remains a master narrator. Sacks always manages to satisfy two appetites at the same time: that for the freakish, and that for knowledge.' --Spectator

'The best-selling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat examines our experience of the visual world.' --Granta magazine

'a remarkably graceful coherence of theme, tone and approach' --The Scotsman

'The Mind's Eye [is] Sacks's most powerful book to date.' --Sunday Telegraph Seven

'The key to Sacks's incredible success is his compassion for those trapped in the obscure corners of medical science, and this book has the added compulsion of Sacks discussing his own eye cancer and the effect it has on his own sight.' --Big Issue

'The book excels in its descriptions of "altered states"... but there are other, more obvious, reasons why we like Sacks's writing ... they illustrate how the everyday tasks we carry out are in fact fantastically complex' --New Scientist

Book Description

The bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat describes how we experience the visual world.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 033050889X
• ISBN 13: 9780330508896
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272