Author: Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, and practicing physician at Columbia University, New York, where he holds the title of "Columbia Artist". This is well earned, as he has had quite a prolific career writing more than a dozen books and magazine articles, many of which have been translated into multiple languages. He writes about his experience treating patients with rather exotic neurological conditions and in this book the focus is around vision and how we actually make sense of the sights that we take in with our eyes.
We often associate our ability to read and recognize objects with our eyes. However, this book got me thinking about the connection between seeing and recognizing and made me appreciate how the brain takes in the visual patterns that we see and makes the association with objects that we can relate to.
This book educated me on "aphasia" which means loss of speech, in either expressive or receptive form. A few years ago my father-in-law suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side. However the more debilitating part was the severe impairment of his language skills and this book gave me a better perspective and explanation of his struggle expressing himself. It taught me how "in some patients, even if they are totally unable to speak or understand speech, there may be perfect preservation of intellectual powers - the power to think logically and systematically, to plan, recollect, to anticipate, to conjecture. "
There are some very nice nuggets of information in the book which are certainly not new discoveries but are nice to appreciate. For instance, I am sure that many of you know that "Predators, in general, have forward facing eyes, with much overlap of the two fields; prey animals by contrast, tend to have eyes at the sides of their heads, which gives them panoramic vision, helping them spot danger even if it comes from behind."
The last two chapters are meandering and went on for too long. In "Persistence of Vision" Sacks describes the problems that develop in his right eye. I admire the detailed notes that he kept during this period, however, this is way too much information for someone like me. Similarly in the last chapter that is also titled "The Mind's Eye", he goes through several different cases from history, only to conclude that everyone's internal visualization is different. I got the point with the first couple of examples and the additional accounts didn't add much to demonstrate how little we understood about the functioning of the visual cortex.
Overall, this is certainly an enlightening book and it educates you about the subtleties of how visual stimuli are processed in our brain. There are many types of impairments that you will learn from the book, including the author's own "prosopagnosia", which is an inability to recognize faces. Read this book if you are curious about how the brain processes visual information.
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, and practicing physician at Columbia University, New York, where he holds the title of "Columbia Artist". This is well earned, as he has had quite a prolific career writing more than a dozen books and magazine articles, many of which have been translated into multiple languages. He writes about his experience treating patients with rather exotic neurological conditions and in this book the focus is around vision and how we actually make sense of the sights that we take in with our eyes.
We often associate our ability to read and recognize objects with our eyes. However, this book got me thinking about the connection between seeing and recognizing and made me appreciate how the brain takes in the visual patterns that we see and makes the association with objects that we can relate to.
This book educated me on "aphasia" which means loss of speech, in either expressive or receptive form. A few years ago my father-in-law suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side. However the more debilitating part was the severe impairment of his language skills and this book gave me a better perspective and explanation of his struggle expressing himself. It taught me how "in some patients, even if they are totally unable to speak or understand speech, there may be perfect preservation of intellectual powers - the power to think logically and systematically, to plan, recollect, to anticipate, to conjecture. "
There are some very nice nuggets of information in the book which are certainly not new discoveries but are nice to appreciate. For instance, I am sure that many of you know that "Predators, in general, have forward facing eyes, with much overlap of the two fields; prey animals by contrast, tend to have eyes at the sides of their heads, which gives them panoramic vision, helping them spot danger even if it comes from behind."
The last two chapters are meandering and went on for too long. In "Persistence of Vision" Sacks describes the problems that develop in his right eye. I admire the detailed notes that he kept during this period, however, this is way too much information for someone like me. Similarly in the last chapter that is also titled "The Mind's Eye", he goes through several different cases from history, only to conclude that everyone's internal visualization is different. I got the point with the first couple of examples and the additional accounts didn't add much to demonstrate how little we understood about the functioning of the visual cortex.
Overall, this is certainly an enlightening book and it educates you about the subtleties of how visual stimuli are processed in our brain. There are many types of impairments that you will learn from the book, including the author's own "prosopagnosia", which is an inability to recognize faces. Read this book if you are curious about how the brain processes visual information.
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