Comments   Summary   Excerpt   Reviews   Author Notes

Summary: From the author of the best-selling Musicophilia (hailed as "luminous, original, and indispensable" by The American Scholar), an exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals-including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill. Most dramatically, Sacks gives us a riveting account of the appearance of a tumor in his own eye, the strange visual symptoms he observed, an experience that left him unable to perceive depth. In The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks explores some of the most fundamental facets of human experience-how we see in three dimensions, how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed, and the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains find new ways of perceiving that create worlds as complete and rich as the no-longer-visible world. From the Hardcover edition.