Monday 31 December 2012

Book #7 The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks

The Mind's Eye

Length Of Time In Possession : 1 week

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.

Verdict : 7/10    

Destination : Ebook storage

No comments:

Post a Comment