Eyesight to the Brain

Anyone interested in research about the human brain will want to check out neurologist Oliver Sacks’s The Mind’s Eye. Sacks has made it his lifelong passion to study extreme cases where medical dysfunction sheds a new light on how the human brain and body interact. The book discusses past and present cases—including his own experience with prosopagnosia (face blindness) and the loss of sight in one of his eyes—where language, reading ability, and perception itself are compromised in surprisingly targeted ways. The Mind’s Eye was published in October 2010 and is available in the Imperatore Library. There’s a review of it in the April 2011 Harper’s magazine; take a look at the magazine in the Periodicals section in the Library.

Sacks seems to have had the book’s title on his mind for years: his 2003 New Yorker article “The Mind’s Eye” examines cases where sudden loss of eyesight forces the brain to muster other senses to create a “visual” experience in the brain. The case of Susan Barry became the subject of a 2006 New Yorker article by Sacks called “Stereo Sue.” Barry, herself a neurologist, was born with crossed eyes and spent most of her life unaware that she did not possess stereoscopic or “binocular” vision. (View the article abstracts via the above links, or find the full articles in the ProQuest Research Library on our library databases page.) Barry’s book Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions details her own efforts to acquire, however partially, binocular vision; along the way, a singular picture of the complexity—and flexibility—of the brain emerges. Fixing My Gaze, which features an introduction by Oliver Sacks, was published in 2009 and will be available in the Library this fall.

Check out this interview with Susan Barry on NPR’s “Fresh Air”:

Check out Oliver Sacks on Radiolab in a segment last month called “About Face” where he discusses face blindness: