Visitors here will know that I have long been interested in neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks as a remarkable person, and his work with the brain. Discovered this fascinating interview with him at PLoS Blogs.
Oliver Sacks on Vision, His Next Book, and Surviving Cancer
. . . . "Unlike most of Sacks’ books, however, The Mind’s Eye also addresses the neurologist’s own illness and transition to a profoundly altered life. In 2005, he was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma in his right eye. Though the tumor was eliminated by radiation, Sacks is still struggling with profound changes to his visual field caused by the cancer and its treatment. The bearish 77-year old neurologist — who lives a block from his office in Greenwich Village — hasn’t talked much to the press about his illness, but that’s about to change with the publication of his highly frank account of the ordeal in the new book. This is his first in-depth interview on the subject.
The geeky moment occurs when Sacks is in the hospital, forbidden to leave his room because his opthamologist has embedded a chip of radioactive iodine in his eye in hopes of banishing the tumor. The tiny plaque of I-125 triggers a storm of hallucinations — including starfish, daisies, and purple protoplasm — as well as ravaging pain. In the middle of all this, Sacks muses about asking his long-time editor and friend, Kate Edgar, to fetch his beloved collection of fluorescent minerals so he can conduct an experiment. “Perhaps I could light them up by fixing my radioactive eye, my rays on them,” he writes. “It would be quite a party trick!” That’s Sacks: thinking like a subversive 18th century chemist in the most dire situations, eager to cast the light of science into unmapped recesses of the natural world. . . . . "
. . . . . :Sacks: In general terms, I learned that the brain is always busy. In particular, if a sensory input — whether it be vision or hearing or kinesthesia — is taken away, there will be some sort of compensation, and the cortical systems involved in those representations will become hyperactive. This first became clear to me when I spoke to various blind people. One man, for example, who had lost his sight when he was about 20, said that when he read Braille, he didn’t feel it in his fingers, he saw it. And there’s nice evidence that the occipital areas of the brain, and the inferotemporal areas — visual areas — are excited in that sort of situation.
For myself, I was very struck by this “filling in” business. The first thing that struck me was when I was in hospital and I could pay more attention to these things — perhaps too much attention. But the scotoma in my vision, the blind area, was almost like a window looking into a landscape. I could see movement, and people, and buildings in it — things like those my brain concocts while I’m falling asleep or before a migraine. But this seemed to be going on continuously.
And then there was an episode that very much startled me. Kate was in the room at the time too. I was washing my hands, and then for some reason I closed my left eye, and I continued to see the wash basin, the commode next to it, and the mirror very, very clearly — so clearly, in fact, that my first thought was that the dressing over the right eye must be transparent. But it was a huge, thick, opaque dressing. This was something quite different from an after-image. It was more like a strange persistence or perseveration of vision. The image wasn’t being erased in the usual way. . . . ."
[ Apologies for not having posted during this past week - local problems with my internet connection. ]
