Art & Story Blog

I doodled this while watching this one-hour interview from 1986 with Oliver Sacks:

As you might see from the comment I left on the YouTube page, I found it fascinating and inspiring. Now I want to read his book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” I’m pretty sure this title has come up in conversation fairly recently, it so rings a bell, but I also think one of my figure drawing teachers in college may have handed out an excerpt from this book. Something about learning to see and a recounting of a blind patient who became able to see, but did not understand what he was seeing. Because he had never seen, everything was completely abstract and he had to take the wild sensory information of color, light, dark, and shape, and learn to associate it with actual 3-Dimensional forms and space, of things he’d been familiar in a tactile way for his entire life thus far. It’s possible this wasn’t from Sacks’s book, but watching the interview called this to mind, all the same.