The Mind's Eye
Oliver Sacks
The Mind's Eye
In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks explored music and the brain; now, in The Mind's Eye, he writes about the myriad ways in which we experience the visual world: how we see in three dimensions; how we recognize individual faces or places; how we use language to communicate verbally; how we translate marks on paper into words and paragraphs, even how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed.
3.7 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Psychology & Psychiatry |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
288 |
| RRP |
£17.99 |
| Date of Publication |
November 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0330508896 |
| Publisher |
Picador |
| |
In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks explored music and the brain; now, in The Mind's Eye, he writes about the myriad ways in which we experience the visual world: how we see in three dimensions; how we recognize individual faces or places; how we use language to communicate verbally; how we translate marks on paper into words and paragraphs, even how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed.
Read an extract from the book
"Oliver Sacks: The visionary who can't recognise faces"—Observer 17/10/10
Reviews
The Literary Review
Bryan Appleyard
“Sacks the doctor once again dramatises the most strange and thrilling scientific and cultural issue of our time - the nature of the human mind - through the simple act of telling stories. And he does so with avuncular good nature, even in the midst of his own agonies. Read him for endless consolation.”
01/11/2010
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The New York Times
Annie Murphy Paul
“So rewarding are the compensations of Sacks’ patients, in fact, that we begin to feel as if the tragedies that befell them were not tragedies at all, but — as the self-help books say — opportunities for growth.”
11/11/2010
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The Spectator
Anthony Daniels
“The clinical stories in this volume, apart from his own, are not perhaps among the most absorbing — which for many people probably means the most bizarre — that he has related in his books. But, as ever, he manages artfully to combine the particular with the general so that the reader does not ever have the impression that he is reading a mere treatise, and he remains a master narrator.”
13/11/2010
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The Observer
Paul Broks
“Sacks fans will get what they want: the comfortable prose, the well-crafted storytelling and the generosity of spirit… But I confess there were times when my fingers were racing my eyes in a footnote-stumbling scramble to get through to the end of certain chapters. The case histories were the problem. I found some of them overstuffed, both with detail and moral sentiment. There's only so much compassion a man can take, only so much astonishment at human resilience.”
07/11/2010
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The Sunday Times
Brian Schofield
“...a warm and smart but inconsistent, illfitting work that begins as a gentle farewell tour of the neurological world, flares to life as an entirely different, gripping book, and then falls quite flat. This is a great shame, because the brief chronicle of Sacks’s own illness contained here is both touching and inspiring.”
07/11/2010
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