The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks (PDF)

Description

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 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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In the most tragic of illnesses and most dire of circumstances, Oliver Sacks finds and describes stories of human resiliency, adaptation and fortitude. In his 2010 collection of essays The Mind’s Eye, the aging, yet prolific, neurologist Oliver Sacks chronicles the lives of five patients, each with different neurological illnesses affecting their abilities to properly see and/or perceive the world in which they live. Although each case is unique, Sacks is able to unite the cases by highlighting a common denominator between all five patients: the ability of each patient, without their full cognitive capacities, to find new and creative ways to navigate their ever-confusing environments. Through his beautifully articulate storytelling, Sacks shows us the power of the human mind to overcome it’s own deficiencies, thereby working to crush the stigma of the neurologically impaired as ‘handicapped’, or even impaired at all. From the onset of The Minds Eye, Oliver Sacks invites you inside the world of five of his patients, allowing you to experience their daily lives, routines and personalities. In that respect, Oliver Sacks’ eleventh book is very much like a work of fiction, with only one difference; Sacks’ writing is, at its core, a medical and neurological set of case studies. The collection of essays, if it weren’t for Sacks’ unique writing style, would be much like a textbook; describing patients as having a certain type of disease and discussing such a disease’s side effects. However, Sacks does not let the neurological deficits of the various patients take away any of their personality or character. In other words, Oliver Sacks’ five patients are people first and neurology patients second. For instance, one of the five patients, named Patricia H., is an extremely vibrant and effervescent middle-aged women who suffered a stroke that rendered her unable to speak or understand words – a disease known as aphasia. Before describing or even alluding to any form of illness, Sacks uses the first handful of pages to describe Patricia’s life, character and family history. He writes about how ‘she loves to cook’, ‘ran an art gallery on Long Island’ and was married to ‘a man of many parts- a radio broadcaster and a fine pianist who sometimes played at nightclubs’. Sacks puts an image in the readers head of a perfectly normal woman – a strategy that alludes to Sacks’ overall goal of the text; to show how neurological diseases may take away one’s ability to talk, see or listen; but, for the most part, they do not take away a person’s personality or charm. Only after he chronicles Patricia’s personal history and unique attributes does Sacks describe how she lost her ability to speak after suffering a blood clot that left her in a coma for weeks. Sacks goes on to write about how Patricia, even without an ability to speak, ‘remained active and engaged in the world’. Rather than concentrating only on the disease itself (which he still does, even providing very interesting stories about the etymology and history of aphasia), Sacks focuses on how his patients overcome the disease. He highlights how Patricia, and the other four patients (including Sacks himself), adjusts to the fact that they are disabled, not in body but in mind. Sacks turns everyday patients into modern-day heroes by showing their toughness and courage to stay the course, endure strenuous therapy, and assimilate quite seamlessly back into society. Sacks does this (and more) for four other patients; a woman without stereoscopic vision set on working to be able to see again; another woman suffering from Posterior Cortical Atrophy yet maintaining her love of music and cooking by relying heavily on personal memory; a mystery novel writer who losses the ability to read; and finally himself, an eye-cancer survivor whose life was forever changed because of his near-complete loss of vision. The Minds Eye is, however, still a work of science, deeply relying on neurological diseases, physiology and anatomy. But, to Sacks’ credit, the book has the paradoxical ability to both be extremely scientific yet not at the same time. For example, one of Sack’s patients (Lillian K.) suffers from Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a progressive, albeit gradual, degradation of the brain’s outer cortex in the posterior (back side) of the brain. In order to provide the reader with needed context, Sacks spends pages describing what exactly a highly complex disease such as Posterior Cortical Atrophy is (you have a sense of how complex the various diseases are from their names alone). However, wanting his essays to have a mainstream audience, Sacks describes such extremely technical medical conditions in layman’s terms; simplifying incredibly complex conditions by using the power of his conversational writing. Rather than being overwhelmed with scientific terms, concepts and labels, the reader is given the proper medical and scientific context in a reasonable and sensible manner. More than anything, The Mind’s Eye is a bedside book. The collection of essays feels as if it were meant to be read comfortably next to a crackling fire with a hot cup of something delicious in hand. It is much more of a fun read than a set of neurological case studies, and that’s the power that Sacks has; he invites you in the world of the neurologically impaired, not from a medical perspective, but from the perspective of a omnipresent third-eye looking in; quietly overseeing the lives of Lillian, Pat, and others. Being a cancer-patient himself, Oliver Sacks wants you to see what he sees in his patients and also what he hopes to find in himself; a super-human ability to overcome, to endure, and ultimately, to prevail. However, The Minds Eye, like most anything in life, does have a few shortcomings. Being a collection of essays, the respective chapters of the book seem to lack coherence. Each of the cases is starkly different than the rest, with each chapter dedicated to each patient (including Sacks’ own review of his vision loss). In that sense, each chapter seems like a book unto itself. Also, throughout the various essays, Sacks continually referenced his older literary texts (The Man that Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, etc.) without much explanation or context; references that I assume must have been very confusing for readers unfamiliar with Sacks’ quite expansive body of work. Given the book’s few flaws, Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye is still a fantastic read for any type of booklover. Science-oriented readers will thoroughly enjoy Sacks’ explorations of various neurological diseases, while the non-science bookworm can find appreciation in Sacks’ beautiful prose and the book’s unique narrative structure. Because of Oliver Sacks’ fantastic ability as a storyteller and writer, I highly recommend The Mind’s Eye to anyone who wants to navigate the world of the mind and find splendor in the human quality of perseverance.

⭐Oliver Sacks is a master at this kind of book and this one is no exception. He has a fluidity about his writing that engages the reader and provides many layers of description to help understand each case and the patient being discussed.The manner of review of these cases is instructive when we look at where we are in the development of the ‘science’ of neurology. A science, in its development, goes through several stages…… first, there is description of a phenomenon, then there is some some attempt at explaination of what happens or happened. In more advanced science, there will be prediction. In medicine, it seems that the highest level of understanding is evidenced by treatment or intervention, and resolution of the symptom or defect through intelligently applied action.Oliver Sacks conveys beautifully crafted ‘thick description’. He describes the various conditions, and names them according to the most up to date understanding about the constellation of symptoms afflicting the patient. He is able to convey the categories of importance in classifying one condition vs another. And his personal set of life experiences give him a sort of empathy that is helpful in conveying the affect of the condition on life quality.There is also a predictive component of sorts, an understanding of the likely future course of the condition and the symptoms that will present in later stages. What is missing in this field is treatment and intervention. He has done some wonderful work, and the L dopa treatments he described in his earlier work were groundbreaking, but treatment seems to be an exception in this field rather than the rule. The patient presents with symptoms, and the professionals are left to predict the course of the disease (like Alzheimer’s) but have no intervention or treatment readily available to stop or reverse it. This shows how early we are in the development of this branch of medicine. Lots of improvements have been made, and treatments now exist for all kinds of conditions that (like depression) were in this unknown area years ago, but much is yet to be learned.So, this book is another tour. And another reminder that we are in the very early days of really understanding the magic that occurs between our ears. It is readable and interesting from cover to cover. But the thing we must wait for is the depiction of the treatment or surgery and the healing and curing of the condition. We can only watch now, and describe, and hope to find our way to the wisdom it will take to find cures.

⭐Although they aren’t reviewed here, I have read, I believe, at least half of Dr Sack’s works. As you would surmise, I am a big fan of his.I watched the two hour special that ran on PBS detailing his life and his pending death due to melanoma that had metastasized. This book touches on this as he is the last patient discussed in his book as he was diagnosed with ocular melanoma.The Mind’s Eye is about the sense of sight, specifically, what happens when their eyesight fails them. Not that they become blind, but they are no longer to use their vision the way they were used to. If the book demonstrates over and over again, it our ability to adapt to the situation and thrive. This isn’t to say that this is easy but with perseverance, we can overcome.My only qualm with the book is knowing that as I was reading Dr Sacks’ experience with his ocular melanoma and having one eye not quite in sync with the other, knowing that he would succumb to his cancer. His chapter was a melancholy read.As with his other books, I cannot recommend this book any higher. For anyone interested in patient experiences and the ability to overcome, this is a book for you. You will not be disappointed.

⭐I loved this book, especially the chapter ‘Recalled to Life’ because of its insights into how stoke victims could lose certain faculties but learn to compensate for them by developing tactics in other areas, to cope. It also disclosed how strokes could lead to an inability to either translate sensory data into verbal terms or interpret input, to make sense of the world around them. Some people suffered word blindness – others lost facial recognition as an ability. Some were able to talk in an intelligible manner but when asked analyse what they’d said or done, they couldn’t make sense of their thoughts or actions. It affected verbal and visual memory as well as passive (receptive) or active (transmittive) states of mind – in other words input or output. It was like they never reached a perception point of realizing what they were seeing or a recognition point because their memories of what they were seeing weren’t there anymore or available to them.Some of these difficulties involved abstract knowledge as opposed to objective reality (written or spoken language as ‘representational’ data): Could lack of a sense of direction be down to the same magnetic sense in migrating birds, being lost or damaged?In The Beth Abraham Hospital for Incurables, residents / patients found ways round their disabilities through mimicry – that is using other sensory input to kick start memory in lost areas or to communicate in new ways (visual or verbal mostly as for instance, tracing the shape of letters in mid-air or forming words with their tongues; ‘Only connect…’ CS Forester): Children’s books teach the alphabet by simulcra that resemble the abstract forms of letters e.g’s a post for 1, a sail for 4, a catapult for Y etc.Phil Beadle, the teaching trouble-shooter, says that there are three ways of sensory learning input – visual, sonic and tactile. This reflects the areas of difficulties for stroke victims as they try to relearn communication skills.

⭐Having read 3 other books from Oliver Sacks I am am more than certain that the contents of this book, like his others is fascinating, captivating and above all deeply human. However,I am starting to grow tired of receiving these books in a somewhat poor condition; The man who mistook his wife for a hat for example was scuffed on the edges of the cover, An anthropologist on Mars came with a bent front cover.Not a big deal.This product however arrived in much worse condition, front and back cover bent and scuffed and damage to the top of the book so bad that a good portion of the pages are slightly ripped.Not what one expects when buying a New! Book..I can get over these faults as I am not overly obsessive over keeping my books well preserved. I know others however, are and this is who this review is for so keep this in mind when thinking of purchasing on here.

⭐Oliver Sacks, now nearly 80 is the respected neurologist behind the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and the well known book and film Awakenings. In this volume he discusses visual perception, what blind people can “see” for example and relates a journal of his own, terrifying, experience of eye cancer.It was different from the book I thought it was going to be because it did have a lot to do with actual vision as opposed to what we see when we visualise inside our own minds and how that works, inner visualisation is only really discussed in reference to blind people, and not how it works neurologically for most people.Like in “Hat” Sacks includes several case studies of people he has known or treated who have had to adapt to unusual types of blindness, and then a new case study, his own, as doctor becomes patient.It was still, despite not being the book I expected, very readable and I will certainly continue to read Sacks.

⭐If you have read any other books by Oliver Sacks you will know that they are collections of fascinating and obscure medical case histories, usually linked together by a theme. In this case the theme is sight and particularly the role of the brain in vision. We meet people who have lost the ability to read words but can still write, people who have no depth of vision, people whose ability to read music comes and goes, people who cannot recognise faces and people who cannot forget them. But what sets this book apart from Sacks’ other case reports (which can be a little detached and clinical) is the moving account of his own experience of ocular melanoma, a cancer of the eye. In a diary-style chapter we see how the melanoma impacts on Sacks’ sensory world and how the treatment ultimately affects his vision. A compelling read.

⭐Oliver Sacks’ books are always fascinating and absorbing – if you see his name on the cover and want something to read on your journey, or sitting out in the sun in a local park, or of an evening, or at any other time, buy the book. In the opening case history of ‘In the Mind’s Eye’ we are given the name of the patient, an outstanding concert pianist. She’s well represented on the internet, so looking her up provides added interest. This is outstanding book – put your money down – you won’t regret it.

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