After my intensive weeks with triathlon I feel it is high time to shift gears and focus on other topics too. My readers who are not involved with this sport may be bored by then, and complain about the monotony. Since weeks I have not been checking my newsreader, today I did… being so tired that I just let myself drift through the headlines, my eyes came to an halt at the name of Oliver Sacks. I listened to his talk and it really hit me. It gives wonderful evidence that seeing is not only a phenomenon induced by the world that surrounds us, but also by the very inside of our body and brain.
If your eyes go blind, then you may realize that seeing is a complex process that also produces images without external stimuli. And I think we should be aware of the fact that seeing (hallucinating) is not necessarily connected with insanity. Many a blind person probably sees images and doesn’t dare to speak about them because they are afraid of being discriminated as insane.
Oliver Sacks is well known as a writer of such best-selling case histories as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and his memoir of his early work, Awakenings, all of which have breathed new life into the dusty 19th-century tradition of the clinical anecdote. He maintains a small practice in New York City.
