the minds eye - oliver sacks

[...]... could see at a glance that there were eight —two rows of four—but Lilian, I suspect, could not perceive the eightness, the gestalt, easily and had to enumerate the eggs one by one And the spices, she said, were “a disaster.” They all came in identical red-topped bottles, and, of course, she could not read the labels So: “I smell them! … And I call for help some of the time.” With the microwave oven, which... and then went to the front porch to get his newspaper But the paper on his doorstep seemed to have undergone an uncanny transformation: N ANUARY OF 2002 The July 31, 2001, Globe and Mail looked the way it always did in its make-up, pictures, assorted headlines and smaller captions The only difference was that I could no longer read what they said The letters, I could tell, were the familiar twenty-six... brought them into focus, they looked like Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next Was this a Serbo-Croatian version of the Globe, made for export? … Was I the victim of a practical joke? I have friends who are capable of such things.… I wondered what I might do to them that would improve on this piece of foolery Then, I considered the alternative possibility I checked the Globe’s inside pages to see if they... He woke his son, and together they took a cab to the hospital Along the way, Howard thought he saw “familiar landmarks in unfamiliar places,” and he could not read the names of streets as they passed, nor the words “Emergency Room” when they arrived at the hospital—though he at once recognized the picture of an ambulance over the door He underwent a battery of tests, and these confirmed his own suspicion:... is possible for most of these patients, many of them can nonetheless be helped to reconstruct their lives, to develop other ways of doing things, capitalizing on their strengths, finding compensations and accommodations of every sort (This, of course, depends upon the degree and type of neurological damage, and upon the inner and outer resources of the individual patient.) If the first sight of a chronic... Schubert—and then the elaboration of this in the Wanderer Fantasy In the elevator, she was greeted by some neighbors It was not clear to me whether she recognized them visually or by their voices She instantly recognized voices, sounds of all sorts; indeed, she seemed hyperattentive here, as she was to colors and shapes They had assumed a special importance as cues She had no difficulty crossing the street... before I wondered how she could read the time, since she was wearing a wristwatch She could not read the numbers, she said, but could judge the position of the hands I then showed her, mischievously, a strange clock I have, in which the numbers are replaced by the symbols of elements (H, He, Li, Be, etc.) She did not perceive anything the matter with this, since for her the chemical abbreviations were no... seltzer She had trouble finding the seltzer in her refrigerator, and, not seeing the bottle, which was “hidden” behind a jug of orange juice, she had taken to exploring the refrigerator by hand, groping for a bottle of the right shape “It is not getting better.… The eyes are very bad.” (She knows, of course, that her eyes are fine, and that it is the visual parts of the brain that are declining—indeed,... over—not only the great things of life but the little familiar pleasures of each day, like doing the New York Times crossword, to which she was addicted She requested that the Times be brought to her each day, so that at least she could look at the puzzle, get its configuration, run her eyes along the clues But when she did this something extraordinary happened, for as she looked at the clues, the answers... Within twenty-four hours all but a few words eluded my grasp Those that did remain proved to be nearly useless, for I could no longer recall the way in which they had to be coordinated for the communication of ideas.… I was no longer able to grasp the ideas of others, for the very amnesia that prevented me from speaking made me incapable of understanding the sounds I heard quickly enough to grasp their meaning.… . Publication Sacks, Oliver W. The mind’s eye / Oliver Sacks. eISBN: 97 8-0 -3 0 7-5 945 5-6 1. Visual perception. 2. Blindness—Psychological aspects. I. Title. BF241.S136 2010 152.14 C201 0-9 0142 9-4 v3.1 for. previously published material may be found following the index. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sacks, Oliver W. The mind’s eye / Oliver Sacks. p. cm. “This is a Borzoi book.” 1. Communicative. piano concertos, and there was a last-minute change in the program, from the Nineteenth Piano Concerto to the Twenty-first. But when she flipped open the score of the Twenty- first, she found it,