I've enjoyed all the Oliver Sacks books I have read. The Mind's Eye begins with his usual case studies in neurology and psychiatry, this time they are all visual conditions.
Oliver Sacks is popularly known for Robin Williams portrayal of him in the film Awakenings, and for highlighting the work of Temple Grandin. His title The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat was the first collection of his neurological cases I had read and I found his writing clear, fascinating, and intriguing.
The Mind's Eye begins with Lillian, a classic pianist who develops a cortical atrophy causing her to slowly forget the names and purposes of things. Looking at a painting, she differentiates the colours, but cannot tell whether it is one object or many, or something to do with the ceiling? A clock, A fan? Yet she can play piano and even rearrange the music in her head with ease. Another case has a very social woman becoming paralyzed and yet finding a new way to continue her busy schedule with friends and family, learning a new way to communicate. Sacks is a member of the Stereoscopic Society of New York, and over a few years helps another woman who lives without stereoscopic vision, the world she sees is all on a flat plane. Over the years, her vision changes and she experiences the world in three dimensions for the first time.
Sacks himself is the subject of several sections, firstly about face-blindness. He has no recollection of people's faces or places he has been, including his long time assistant and another doctor he has seen weekly for years. He will run into them minutes after just seeing them and not recognize them in the slightest. As a person who relies on a strong photographic memory, I found the descriptions of visual agnosia eye opening.
The most fascinating was excerpts from Sacks own journals when he developed a tumour behind his eye and the resulting procedures to remove it, leaving him without stereoscopic vision. Worse yet, over time he develops a loss of peripheral vision. All this while preparing his book Musicophilia.
His experiences as a patient with ocular melanoma were interesting, as well as the cases of people who either retained their visual memory after blindness, or developed a whole new way of seeing, beyond what sighted people experience.
As always, his neurological cases are fascinating and I highly enjoy spending time with Oliver Sacks. The writing is engaging and his conversational tone opens up the technical aspects of neurology to me.
2010 / Hardcover / 264 pages
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