“the Mind’s Eye”

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, and has written about patients whose lives have been transformed by brain disorders. His mother arose his interest in brain function from his childhood experience of visual migraines. Later on, when he grew up, Sacks devoted himself to the promotion of the humane practice of medicine, especially for people with brain disorders.

“The Mind’s Eye” is an essay that reveals the lives of people who turned blind. At the beginning of the essay, Sacks gives us an example of profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness to explain the life experiences of people who are going blind. And Sacks makes a comment about the situation that those people are facing as a huge challenge in their lives, because they are forced to try to find a new way of living due to the destruction of their old way of life, given their new blindness.

After Sacks makes this comment about those blind people, he illustrates examples of four authors who have experienced blindness. Firstly, by using descriptive narration, Sacks introduces John Hull, from whom he obtained an extraordinary book called Touching the Rock. John Hull is a professor of religious education in England, and he is a typical example of a person who became blind in later life, because John Hull could see clearly before he was seventeen years old. However, after that, Hull’s left eye was totally becoming blind while his right eye had a steadily failing vision. He needed stronger magnifying glasses and thicker pens in order to see his hand-writing more clearly. Nevertheless, Hull became completely blind when he was forty-eight in 1983. Hull writes about his experience after his transition in Touching the Rock. The most attractive part for Sacks is the process of how Hull became blind, which are the steps of losing his visual imagery and memory. Hull called this “deep blindness.” Hull didn’t mean a loss of visual imagery, but the idea of a complete loss of seeing. Sacks gives us examples to explain...