Analysis Of The Mind's Eye By Oliver Sacks

People cannot live without brightness, so they invented electricity and lamps. In some words, people are afraid of living in the dark. However, not all individuals would have the opportunities to see brightness and some of them only can stay in the darkness to understand the world. Through the darkness, people would redefine their self identities and reconsider who they are. In the article “The Mind’s Eye,” the author Oliver Sacks examines different solutions of different people when they face blindness as adults. Sacks explores a new perspective and creativity of the brain when people lose their sense of sight. People would gain a new ability or reshape their identities when they face darkness. In some aspects, those girls who live under
People are not perfect during their long lives and they may face different troubles; but when those troubles are used to learn or enhance a person, that makes it a gift. Unfortunately, blindness would be a deadly blow to most people. John Hull is a professor of religious education in England and he is the author of the book “Touching the Rock” which talks about his transition to life as a blind person. Hull lost his sight when he was forty-eight. He defines his blindness as “a deep blindness” (Sacks 329). However as Hull adapts to darkness, he becomes a “whole-body seer”(Sacks 330), where he begins to shift his attention to his other senses and acquire a different power. Sacks mentions that “With his new intensity of auditory experience (or attention), along with the sharpening of his other senses, Hull came to fell a sense of intimacy with nature, a intensity of being-in-the-world, beyond anything he had know when he was sighted” (330). After Hull lost his sight, he learned how to acquire real intimacy with nature by heart and balance relationship with the real world. When Hull lost his “idea of seeing” (Sacks 329), he lost direction in his mind, he fell into a black world. However, as he experienced blindness for two years, he found a way to stay intimate without trying to pretend as if he was a normal person. Hull began to change his perspective about
Imagination is the enlightenment for human beings to create their own worlds. Because imagination comes from humans’ brains, there is no difference between blind people and normal people to describe their world. Sabriye Tenberken is the author of her memoir about blindness “My Path Leads to Tibet .” Although she is blind, she still traveled Tibet and enjoyed the beautiful sights through her vivid imagination. When she traveled, Sacks mentions that “It then turned out that she had not been ‘looking’ at the lake at all, but facing in another direction, ‘staring’ at rocks and a gray landscape. These disparities do not faze her in the least-she is happy to have so vivid a visual imagination” (334). Although Tenberken is blind, but she can enjoy the lake view with her colorful imagination. Blindness took away part of her world, but she can still use color to identify objects. There is not only white and black in the blind world, those blind people still have the ability to create a colorful world, which is similar to the real world. People can control their own identities to be happy or not by coloring their imaginary world. They can think their identities in colorful ways. Tenberken’s experience is similar to those students who live in Iran as they also want to bring color to decorate their world by using imagination. Nafisi mentions that “Perhaps one way of finding out the truth was to