The Mind's Eye (Audiobook) By Oliver Sacks, Richard Davidson
Sacks, a neurologist and practicing physician at Columbia University Medical Center, and author of ten popular books on the quirks of the human mind (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) focuses here on creative people who have learned to compensate for potentially devastating disabilities. From the concert pianist who progressively lost the ability to recognize objects (including musical scores) yet managed to keep performing from memory, to the writer whose stroke disturbed his ability to read but not his ability to write (he used his experience to write a novel about a detective suffering from amnesia)...
Sacks, a neurologist and author of the popular The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat ( LJ 2/15/86), developed a serious interest in sign language and deafness after reviewing Harlan Lane's When the Mind Hears ( LJ 10/15/84 ) for the New York Review of Books . In this work, Sacks explores all facets of the deaf world--he meets with deaf people and their families and visits schools for the deaf, spending a good deal of time at Gallaudet University. As he writes, "I had now to see them in a new, 'ethnic light,' as people with a distinctive language, sensibility, and culture of their own."
This revised edition of Oliver Sacks's book is considerably expanded with additional case histories, new findings and practical information on treatment. In a new chapter, illustrated with startling colour paintings by migraine patients, Dr Sacks discusses similiarities among the visual hallucinations, or auras, that often precede a migraine and those that are induced by hallucinogenic drugs or deliria. Drawing on recent advances in chaos theory and neural stimulation, he describes these "hallucinatory constants" and what they reveal about the working of the brain.
