Oliver Sacks, "The Mind's Eye"

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:  

1. Early in his essay, Sacks poses this question: "Does the mind run the brain or the brain the mind-or, rather, to what extent does one run the other?" Most of the discussion that follows this question, however, concerns the experience of blindness: instead of providing an extended analysis of mental processing or brain chemistry, Sacks gives us details about people who have lost their vision and then adapted in different ways. How do these accounts of blindness connect to the debate about mind and brain?  

2. To what extent are the different responses of the people Sacks discusses attributable to their individual ways of "being in the world"? Do you see any evidence of a continuity in the behavior of his subjects before and after the onset of their blindness? What are the larger implications of their adaptations? Would you say that the world is what we make it, or are there limits to the power of imagination, intelligence, and determination? What does Sacks appear to believe?  

3. At one point in his essay, Sacks recalls a period in his life when he was "experimenting with large doses of amphetamines":

For a period of two weeks or so, I found that I could do the most accurate anatomical drawings. I had only to look at a picture or an anatomical specimen, and its image would remain both vivid and stable, and I could easily hold it in my mind for hours. I could mentally project the image onto the paper before me-it was as clear and distinct as if projected by a camera lucida-and trace its outlines with a pencil. . . . But when the amphetamine-induced state faded, . . . I could no longer visualize, no longer project images, no longer draw-nor have I been able to do so in the decades since.

Why does Sacks include this vignette? What point does he make, and how does the passage extend the argument he develops in the previous pages? Does it matter that the story he tells is personal?  

Questions for Writing:  

1. Do the discoveries of neuroscience undermine our assumptions about such issues as free will, the uniqueness of each individual, and the importance of creativity? Ordinarily, we might think that if we can explain an emotion like love or the experience of beauty as the product of the brain's hardwiring, something important will be lost. But will it? Is human behavior in any way diminished or degraded by our knowledge of brain science? In what ways might an understanding of neuroscience foster greater understanding and a tolerance for diversities-and uniformities-in human behavior?  

2. For the last century or so, thinkers have debated the relative influence of "nature" and "nurture" over human behavior. By "nature," people ordinarily mean biology, chemistry, genetics, and neuroscience. By "nurture," they mean custom, culture, and education. What does Sacks's essay contribute to this debate? Can he be accused of perpetuating "reductionism": Does he, in other words, oversimplify the complexities of human life by reducing everything to one explanation?  

3. On the basis of the evidence that Sacks provides, can we ever say that human behavior is entirely "hardwired"? Can we argue, in other words, that the ways in which we act are predetermined by the structure and functioning of our brains? Or are we entitled to say that the brain is flexible enough to adapt to an event like the loss of sight in ways that are infinitely varied? Do the adaptations vary infinitely, or are there biological limits? Are there no commonalities among all the different adaptations that Sacks discusses? Do you think that these commonalities have their origin in the brain, or can they be explained in some other way?  

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1. In what ways does Sacks's essay complicate or even contradict Gregory Stock's argument in "The Enhanced and the Unenhanced"? On the basis of the evidence that Sacks provides, would you say that intelligence resides primarily in our brains, or is it a product of the ways in which we interact with the world? If intelligence does not reside entirely in our brains, but is also a quality of our behavior, then how likely is it that intelligence might be passed on through or improved by genetic engineering? Is education just as likely as genetic engineering to produce creative, thoughtful, and adaptive people?

2. Sacks suggests that the brain is actually quite flexible in its adaptations to the world. If this is so, then many different ways of organizing experience would seem to be possible. Are all ways of organizing experience equally successful as survival strategies? Did the individuals Sacks studies "choose" their mode of adaptation, or was their mode of adaptation presented to them as the only option, given how their individual minds worked? Is it possible that human consciousness has evolved through trial and error in much the same way as different species have evolved? Drawing on Stephen J. Gould's essay, "What Does the Dreaded 'E' Word Mean, Anyway," or on Frans de Waal's "Selections from The Ape and the Sushi Master," explore the possible dynamics behind the evolution of consciousness.

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