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The Mind's Eye


Stuart Manins's profile picture
Posts: 8

15 January 2023, 22:59

Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, Dr Oliver Sacks has written widely since his first highly entertaining and informative book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; from Medicine to Music and Migraines to Anthropology on Mars.

His range of topic has been matched by a deepening understanding of and sympathy for patients who would normally be described as handicapped, for example musicians unable to sightread music, speakers unable to speak—all after being highly skilled in such areas.

The field is so large that I shall focus only on one chapter of one book for my comments which have developed in me an increasing awareness of the unexpected, extraordinary and the amazing ability of the human being to not only adjust to adversity but rejoice in it!

Some things I know I don’t know, but most remain unknown in silence. Here is a journey involving perception and knowledge, the mind and the body, the brain, feeling and the imagination.

The last chapter of The Mind’s Eye asks how much our own experiences are predetermined by nature or by nurture. An Australian psychologist, Zoltan Tovey, blinded at 21, against advice to switch from a visual to an aural mode of adjustment, had moved in the opposite direction to gain ‘greater sight’ from his inner eye. It had allowed him even to “project himself inside machines”.

Jacques Lusseyran, blinded at 7, was a Resistance fighter in France in WW2, who described in a memoir, And Yet There Was Light, his fighting Nazis and later his time in Buchenwald Prison Camp. He thought of himself as one of the “visual blind”. His inner eye constructed a screen upon which his thoughts were projected with supernatural powers of visualization and manipulation.

I can understand now Sack’s particular interest in these things when I read that he himself went blind with cancer in his right eye while writing his book, Musicophilia. The great news is that by taking things into our own hands there is much we can do to help ourselves in unexpected ways.

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