Oliver Sacks Research

“To See and Not See”

As I read through the text of Oliver Sacks’ “To See and Not See”, I found some sentences very interestingly show the feeling of the patients to the audience.

1. “He would pick up details incessantly—an angle, an edge, a color, a movement—but would not be able to synthesize them, to form a complex perception at a glance. This was one reason the cat, visually, was so puzzling: he would see a paw, the nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together, see the cat as a whole”.

2. “Skyscrapers strange, cannot understand how they stay up without collapsing.”

3. “Gregory emphasizes this, pointing out how conflict and crisis are inevitable if “the perceptual habits and strategies of a lifetime” are to be changed. Such conflicts are built into the nature of the nervous system itself, for the early blinded adult who has spent a lifetime adapting and specializing his brain must now ask his brain to reverse all this.”

Talking about someone’s story is a tremendously tough job. Sacks described that blind people have to imagine things, they’re like a baby that wish to see the world that they haven’t seen. They forgot that they’re been in the dark for a long, and when they actually see the objects they wish to see, everything sounds so unfamiliar. Oliver Sacks described the painful experience and weird vision coming from the blinds. “Things are not a whole, rather they’re pieces and can’t understand why”.

Resource:

1. http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/sacks-seeing.pdf