#### SPOILER ALERT ####
The Mind's Eye - Oliver Sacks
I wish I could adopt Oliver Sacks or at least live next door to him so I could see him work and talk to him whenever I wanted. I absolutely love the way he writes and I love love love the subjects he writes about. He has a keen insight into the issues he studies and he is a people person. I was a bit surprised to learn that not only does he have trouble recognising faces of people he has know for ages, he has trouble remembering places, frequently gets lost and is terrible at directions! Funny though that may seem it has some real practical drawbacks if you are a well known person who frequently travels and meets new people.
But enough about the fabulous and clever Mr Sacks... on to the book. It is great. Very entertaining, very interesting and best of all, it makes you think "What if...". Some of the things that Sacks describes in the case studies scare the living daylights out of me, some make me think "That would be unfortunate to have" and others do not phase me that much at all. Each story deals with a different aspect of what can happen when the information that the brain receives from the eyes gets processed incorrectly. All the stories interesting in their own right. The beauty of them is that Sacks tell the the stories of these people from a very human point of view. He tells you about the person and the condition they have. Then he tells you a bit about the history of the condition, gives you some other examples and shows you how the people that have them have coped, or not. It is not like reading a medical book or a serious report on a case study. Sacks has managed to make the science behind these conditions easily accessible, interesting and understandable.
Sight reading
This is the story of a woman, Lilian who can read individual letters but cannot read words. She sees the letters but cannot recognise any words. Strangely enough she can write! Also she seems to be unable to recognise normal everyday items. She has learnt to recognise things by colour, size shape, position and context and seems to be managing fine in her own environment. Once things are not where she expects them to be she struggles.Yet she can still play music and rearrange scores in her head. Those abilities are not affected until later on. Over time Sacks shows her that she deteriorates further, recognises less and less shapes even when she touches them and that her world becomes more and more restricted, she even becomes lost in her own apartment and needs more help in her day to day life.
Recalled to Life
Next we meet a woman who went into a coma after a blood clot in her left hemisphere and can then only mime, point or gesture to indicate what she wants to express herself. We see the struggle that Pat goes through to make herself understood and how she manages to cope. We also see that although she has lost a lot of movement (her right side is completely paralysed) and freedom (she is placed in a rehabilitation facility) she has gained a better insight into people by listening to their tone of voice, facial expression and gestures. Pat learns to express herself better with the help of her very own word bible and gestures and mime. Her story shows that with the right help, will power and guidance you can still find a way to express yourself even if the damage in the brain is extensive.
A Man of Letters
Here we meet Howard (who is a writer by profession) who gets up one morning, picks up the newspaper and finds out that he can see the lay out of the text in the paper but cannot read a single letter in it. Letters look strange to him. After some tests it is show he has had a stroke and he has a blind spot in the upper right of his visual field and trouble recognising colours, faces and everyday objects. He found that he could still write but not read what he had written. Howard slowly recovers some of the abilities he had before and through sheer dogged persistence gets his writing career back on track. He learns to use his imagination more and plots out stories in his head before committing them to paper this way he is able to be a writer once again.
Face-Blind
In this tale we find out a bit more about the face blindness Sacks suffers from and the fact that he does not do well with remembering locations and finding his way around, even if he has lived somewhere for years. Meeting people out of their expected context confuses him and if he has to deviate even slightly form a familiar route he gets hopelessly lost. It seems that he is not the only one in his family with these issues which suggests there is a genetic link with these symptoms. There is a funny story where Sacks' assistant arranges for him to meet a colleague who suffers from the same things as Sacks does. Apparently they did manage to meet up but I would have given anything to be there when they first met! I guess it sounds funny but I think not recognising people or places can be quite unsettling and confusing and you have to develop coping strategies for it. sacks recognises his neighbours by the dogs they have, not the way the people look! It seems that there are two extremes on this scale. There are those who cannot even recognise their own spouses or children and there are those that can recognise someone they saw fro a few minutes 30 years ago. Most of us stumble along somewhere in the middle of this bell curve without a care in the world.
Stereo Sue
This one deals with the stereoscopic, three dimensional world that we live in. Losing the vision in one eye can make you lose this way of looking at the world and be experienced as a great loss. Even Sacks himself has experience with it as we find out later. We meet Sue who had problems with her eyes and has only recently started to experience the joys of stereoscopic vision. All of a sudden things seem to pop out of nowhere and he world is the richer for it, she is constantly surprised by things "sticking out" of the world as she knows is and is fascinated by it.
Persistence of Vision
This is the story of how Sacks loses the vision in his right eye and how he tries to cope with the confusing things he does see, and those he can no longer see. It is a very personal and touching story of what happens to him and how he copes whilst also kind of treating himself as a case study. Sacks loses his stereoscopic vision and the ability to see depth and distance but gains some weird "visions", ways of overlaying patterns from the missing visual field in his right eye. However, on the plus side, he is now no longer afraid of heights.
Later on he also has to cope with the loss of his right visual field as a hemorrhage in the bad eye destroys the vision in it completely. Now apart from the visions he has to cope with people on his right side just disappearing and things popping up out of nowhere from the right hand side. Not an easy task but Sacks learns to adapt as best he can to the "large nowhere" in he right visual field and brain.
The Mind's Eye
This one deals with visual memories, seeing and the loss of it.
It seems that when some people go blind they lose the essence of seeing in the mind as well whereas others still say they have a very visual way of "seeing" and imagining things even if they are blind. some people keep images off when they could still see in their heads and can almost see their hands on a the keyboard of a computer or piano. There are people who learn to manipulate object in their minds, become engineers and even able to re-roof their own homes just by being able to imagine what they are doing, visualising it in their heads! For others sound becomes more important and they can even use it to "see" their way around the world. How sound bounces off object can tell them what something looks like and what shape it is.
Sacks then also delves into the area of visual imagery and visual perception. Some people are really good at imagining images, manipulating them in their heads and then using them to build things or test theories. Others are good observers but had only a sort of passive knowledge of the objects they see. They do not have the ability to manipulate them and take them apart in their heads.
I totally loved this book. The stories were interesting and the applied linguist in me really likes to learn about all the crazy stuff that can happen to people when the brain malfunctions. I hope never to get any of the things that Sacks describes in his book. I cannot even begin to imagine what I would feel like if I found I could no longer read.. let alone write.
Title: The Mind's Eye
Author: Oliver Sacks
240 pages
Picador
ISBN# 978-0-330-50890-2
Books to be read: 140
No comments:
Post a Comment