Neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses his book, "The Mind's Eye," with author Cullen Murphy. Presented by Harvard Book Store. More lectures at forum-network.org This talk took place October 28, 2010.
I met Dr. Sacks when he lived in a cottage home on City Island. A fascinating and shy fellow! He gave a name to my lifelong difficulty to recognizing people by their faces. I used to confuse bearded men at my uncle’s logging company and fellow sailor friends of my fathers!
lost my vision to the right and the use of my minds eye from a brain hemorrhage and had years of epilepsy.. from all ive learnt from the likes of this man has made me feel incredibly lucky, many things i can relate to but i got them all by getting better from a devastating experience not going the other way and loosing them.. i learnt them as they came back online so to speak.. i see sound.. hyper sensitivity to my right.. my girlfriend can wake me up just by putting her finger near my right ear.. it feels like its bleeding and i wake up with a strange muscle twinge around the area.. always seeing waves of color and if you was to creep up on me i would see aruas of purple before i felt like i actually heard you, i would see it and feel it before i saw it.. strange world and thankfully people like this guy dedicate their lives to understanding the wonder of the mind.. wish i was as knowledgeable with such great insight as this dude.. legend :) rip
Sad to lose him ... However SIR BRAIN MD ... Dr.Sachs never replied to my question on my own brain thinking so hard that I forced a "projection of a beam of light suddenly emerging from my forehead between my eyes" at 22 years old. My brain and body went into 2 week overwhelming change of activity and thinking. Sachs certainly achieved extraordinary insights into difficulties of human brains.
Fever hallucinations! As a kid I “saw” and “heard” cartoon character organ grinder monkeys dancing around the molding where the walls met the ceiling of my bedroom. I knew they weren’t real, but I wasn’t disturbed by them. I just thought, “Hmmm, isn’t that funny,” as if someone (God?) had put them there for my amusement. I was in the upstairs attic bedroom at my great Aunt Sofie’s house in Montclair, NJ, so I had to have been under age seven. I’m guessing maybe four or five because I don’t think my next younger brother was born yet. I probably had the German measles (rubella) because I remember Uncle Sam bringing me bowls of soup, not my mother. (She may have been pregnant with Thomas, which would explain why she wouldn’t want to risk exposure to rubella. I’m thinking it was already known in 1954/1955 the danger to the fetus.) A lady doctor came to see me at the house, something that impressed and fascinated me because I thought the word for a lady doctor was a nurse, and a male doctor was a doctor. I added doctor to the list of what I was going to be when grown up, a nun who was a US Navy officer, a teacher, a doctor, and later on, a forest ranger!
