Summary Of The Mind's Eye By Oliver Sacks

How We Communicate When people communicate, they have their own views or thoughts to support their points or arguments. By conveying their unique ideas to others, people try to achieve a mutual or conventional understanding of a situation. They wish to classify it as the norm of how something happens to everyone. Oliver Sacks, the author of “The Mind’s Eye”, is a perfect example of someone who attempted to do this. When trying to understand how blindness affects those who are its victims, he was searching for a standard experience that he believed all blind people go through. He states, “Was there any such thing, I wondered, as a typical blind experience” (Sacks, 336)? Oliver was under the impression that there was a conventional process where

Our visual imagery is our mind’s eye. It enables everyone, including most blind people, to have an understanding and/or picture of the world. In “Immune to Reality”, Daniel Gilbert talks about how the brain processes what it sees, and provides an explanation as to why something happened. He mentions, “the eye and the brain are conspirators, and like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room outside of our awareness” (Gilbert, 142). What Daniel Gilbert is trying to say is that what we see is not exactly what the reality of a situation is, and that our eyes work in synchrony with our brains to make this possible. After helping us see things first-hand, the eyes “send” this information to the brain to be processed. What our mind makes of it creates this perception-based visual imagery and understanding of a situation. This manipulation and internal deception occurs, more commonly, without our awareness, affecting the way we talk to one another because we originate with different ideas and views. If everything is subjective, then communication becomes difficult and unreliable since nothing can be classified as