The Mind's Eye in Science and Inquiry

Dec 14, 2010 Petra X rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psycho-neurology-crime

I like all Sacks' books about the neurological problems and adjustments of the people whose stories he tells. However, when he comes to relating his own problems, that's another matter. He goes into far too much detail as though he had confused his audience - most of us are neither personal fans of Oliver Sacks himself (rather than his work) nor are we neurologists ourselves. We just got sucked into neurology-as-a-popular-science by the brilliant Awakenings, or the film of that book starring Rob ...more

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Sep 18, 2010 Cindy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: own, ebook, non-fiction, brainzz, 2010-best-reads

Mind's Eye is classic Sacks. It's a collection of essays with a focus on case studies. This time they were loosely based around the theme of the Mind's Eye - or how our perceptions of the world translate to imagery in the mind. As usual, he looks at people who have some sort of injury, illness or deficit to tell us about the normal functioning processes.

Sacks has never shied away from including his own illnesses and problems in his books. (To wit: A Leg to Stand On and Migraine.) This time felt Mind's Eye is classic Sacks. It's a collection of essays with a focus on case studies. This time they were loosely based around the theme of the Mind's Eye - or how our perceptions of the world translate to imagery in the mind. As usual, he looks at people who have some sort of injury, illness or deficit to tell us about the normal functioning processes.

Sacks has never shied away from including his own illnesses and problems in his books. (To wit: A Leg to Stand On and Migraine.) This time felt brutally personal as he shared both his life-long problem with prosopagnosia (face blindness), and his recent battle with a melanoma tumor on his retina. The latter altered then robbed him of his sight, and we see the normally upbeat the resilient doctor become alarmed, depressed, anxious and doubting. His Melanoma Diary is included verbatim, describing his thoughts as his vision changed day-to-day through the cancer treatments.

The last chapter, which was also titled "Mind's Eye", is very detailed, filled with citations, and had more of a scholarly and philosophical tone than the other case-study/memoir chapters. However, it really brought together the deeper themes in the book: the difference between perception and mental imagery. I suspect this chapter has been published elsewhere before inclusion in the book.

One of the best things I took away from the book is the difference between people who are strong visual imagers and people who do a more abstract type of mental imagery. In that last chapter, he discusses quite a few cases of blind people who have either maintained a very strong sense of visual imagery despite their deficits. He contrasts those with cases where the blind person has completely shifted their mental imagery towards aural, texture, and more abstract imagery. (It turns out Sacks admits he has almost no capabilities to pull up mental visual images, and he attributes some of this to his prosopagnosia.)

It took me a long time to think about the differences, but I think there are strong parallels with my fellow physicists. At work, I have always been a very strong visual, "graph it" person -- I think best about a physical relationship or concept if I can imagine the graph or other physical representation. My husband, at the other extreme, likes to think much more abstractly in equations, and rarely graphs things in his head. As I've chatted with other folks over the years, physicists tend to fall into one or the other category - and I think this is what Sacks is talking about in the last chapter.
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Nov 20, 2010 David Rubenstein rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobook, psychology

In six fascinating vignettes, Oliver Sacks explores fascinating case histories of his patients. In most of these cases, the problems arise within the patients' brains. Several of the patients lose the ability to interpret what they see, although their eyesight is not the problem. They may lose the ability to recognize faces or to read, or to negotiate walking in public spaces. I thought the last chapter to be most interesting, about how most (but not all) sighted people form visual images in the ...more

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Sep 29, 2011 Cassandra Kay Silva rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science

Oliver Sacks is a very enjoyable author. I love the case studies, he makes them just relatable enough while still focusing on the content/diagnosis to keep it intellectual. I had not given much thought to stereo blindness this was extremely interesting to me and the woman's account of what this was like for her seeing after forty some odd years of blindness of this type was simply fascinating. What I love about Sacks is that because many of these people were his personal patients or people that ...more

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