Oliver Sacks The Mind's Eye Analysis

Believe it or not, we live in a world where everyone has a superpower. I am not simply talking about shooting lasers from your eyes or turning yourself invisible when you do not wish to be seen. However, us as humans can fix the roof or even fight in the battlefield with our eyes closed. In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks gives a number of examples of people who lost their sight when they were young; as a result, most of them were able to heighten various senses such as visual imagery, hearing, or touch. On the same hand, Malcolm Gladwell also discusses how sensitively people respond to the changes of their physical conditions in his text. In The Power of Context, Gladwell shows how easily individuals can be influenced by their environment through
In Sacks’ writing, a professor of religious education in England named John Hull who became blind at the age of forty-eight was able to shift “his center of gravity to the other senses and these senses assumed a new richness and power” (Sacks 330). Before Hull went blind, he would have never even imagined of “feeling” the world instead of seeing with his eyes. However, “he wrote of how the sound of rain, never before accorded much attention, could delineate a whole landscape for him, for its sound on the garden path was different from its sound on the lawn, or on the bushes…” and thus, Hull was able to “feel a sense of intimacy with nature...beyond anything he had known when he was sighted” (Sacks 330). The change of his vision has indeed helped Hull discover his abilities to hear and feel the world around him without seeing. Similarly in Gladwell’s text, he presents us with the Broken Windows theory by James Wilson and George Kelling which argues that “crime is the inevitable result of disorder” and that “if a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge...and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street” (Gladwell 152). This theory again grasps the idea of how altering the physical surroundings can bring out a person’s hidden instinct, in this case an instinct to commit crimes. Everyone has the ability to commit crimes; most of us just choose not to because it is against the law. However, the Broken Windows theory define those of us who commit crimes as “far from being someone who acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons” and that those criminals are actually people who are “acutely sensitive” to their environment and are prone to commit crimes based on their “perception of the world” around them (Gladwell 156). In short, this theory states that the change in our environment is the