The Mind's Eye

(Paperback)

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Description

The bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat describes how we experience the visual world. 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 capacity to recognise 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, and The Mind's Eye is testament to the myriad ways that we, as humans, are capable of rising to this challenge. As such, it's also testament to the human power of creativity and adaptation.

Reviews

The Mind's Eye is about the possibility of recovery and the inexorable decline of the ageing individual. From this collision of incompatible truths, tragedy is made . . . making this Sacks's most powerful book to date. * Sunday Telegraph *
Packed with wisdom, humour, extraordinary human stories and reflections on how we all perceive the world . . . He ends with a brilliant discussion of blindness and the ways in which blind people develop visual concepts. Heartily recommended. * Readers Digest *

Author Bio

Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of ten previous books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film) and Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is the first, and only, Columbia University Artist, and is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire.