The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)

Sacks is famous for his insightful case studies of people dealing with neurological challenges, and this volume maintains that tradition. Here he focuses on issue related to visual imagery: the ability, or lack of ability, to see things one's imagination, the "mind's eye." The stories he tells range from people with no ability to imagine visual stimuli at all, to the blind man whose visual imagination is so strong he relied on it to climb up on his roof by himself to repair it. Along the way we met a woman who can see shapes and colors perfectly well but can't use that information to recognize what she is looking at and learned about Sacks's own journey as he progressively lost vision in one eye to cancer. As always, Sacks focuses more on each individual's experience, how the challenges affect each one as a person in daily life, than on brain circuitry or the firing of neural impulses. I enjoyed this collection quite a lot.