Publisher's Synopsis
From the author of the #1 national bestsellingMusicophiliacomes a truly visionary book: an exploration of the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains cope with the loss of sight by finding new forms of perception to create worlds as complete and rich as the no-longer-visible world.
Following the phenomenal success of his international bestsellerMusicophilia, the inimitable Oliver Sacks returns with another book on the extraordinary interaction between our brain and our senses - in this case, vision. InThe Mind's Eye, Sacks examines questions ranging from the primary experiences of how we perceive depth or color or motion to the complex matter of how different individuals have varied ways of thinking and experiencing or recreating the visual world. LikeThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a HatandAn Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks's new book is based primarily on individual stories - including Sacks's own experience of an ocular tumor that left him unable to perceive depth. As always, he embeds these case histories in a rich historical and scientific context. Sacks goes beyond basic vision to explore perception, hallucination and the power of visualization, as well as the ocular effects of migraine, epilepsy and other conditions. Oliver Sacks is our perfect guide to the visual world, a realm that, it turns out, is much, much more complicated than we could have imagined.
