Oliver Sacks video + interview on hallusinations on TED.com

[kestrell]

Video
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html

and interview
http://blog.ted.com/2009/09/qa_with_oliver.php


I don't think I had ever heard someone actually pronounce this before, so it was interesting to hear that the syndrome is pronounced "Sharls Bonnay."

On the other hand, in my own experience, I used to have these hallusinations much more often when I was low vision than I do now as a blind person. My experience as a blind person now is that I have a mental film festival running nearly 24/7--it's like my brain is an all-night cinema--but I think that is visual imagination, not hallucination. As usual, I am a bit squicked by how Sacks ascribes abnormal experiences to PWD: he states that about 10% of blind people have these hallucinations, when basically every other source I have read on this syndrome ascribes it to having something to do with the process of losing vision, where someone would be less able to say definitively that what s/he was seeing was really there or a hallucination. Is this like Sacks claiming as he did in his last book that one out of two people born blind had perfect pitch? He never gave a source for that number, either.

Anyway, the new book on vision and visual memeory sounds interesting.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I need an icon that conveys my huge annoyance with Sacks' eagerness to "other" people with disabilities. According to well-placed rumor-mongerers, he's "one of us," but he seems to have built huge sectors of his fame, well-being, and self-esteem on reporting on "them."

(Clinical depression.)

And of course your brain is an all-night cinema. You were in media studies, after all! /sticks out tongue & runs away.

[kestrell]

*Kestrell follows the sounds of the not-quite-stealthy Wheeled Wonder Woman and repeatedly fires her confetti phaser at her*

Sacks has multiple disabilities--notice how the interview mentioned that he had experienced these hallucinations himself since he lost visioin in one eye?--but like a lot of self-identified able-bodied people, he frames himself as the impartial observer who has nothing in common with the ethnographic group which he studies. I still say the title of his most famous book _An Anthropologist on Mars_ provides the definitive statement on how he views himself as the scientist and the people he studies as aliens. And a lot of what he writes is about alienation--one quote I read from him in an interview mentioned that he was celibate because he found having relationships too difficult.

[kestrell]

I think you should photoshop him into the scene from "Freaks" with the caption "One of us! One of us!" underneath his picture.