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Oliver Sacks Hallucinates, The World Learns

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The British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks recently chronicled the experience of losing his sight from ocular melanoma in a series of journals and an interview with Wired magazine.

It’s the sign of a rigorous scientist to empiricize personal deterioration and apparently Sack’s experience revealed some interesting tidbits. He saw chessboards and question marks float in and out of his field of vision in his right eye. This allowed him a geater level of empathy when interacting with his visually-impaired patients. Sacks, who now has no central vision, also landed a gig on Ted Talks, to be posted shortly, where he further revealed the secrets of sight and sightlessness.


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Dr. Oliver Sacks’ 2013 book Hallucinations is a tremendous anthology of case studies of hallucinatory experiences recorded through his decades of work as a clinical neurologist, his analysis of clinical […]

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