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.