Oliver Sacks, M.D.

ENGAGE WITH US:

Menu
  • About
  • Books
    • Everything In Its Place
    • The River of Consciousness
    • Gratitude
    • On The Move
    • Hallucinations
    • The Mind’s Eye
    • Musicophilia
    • Oaxaca Journal
    • Uncle Tungsten
    • The Island of the Colorblind
    • An Anthropologist on Mars
    • Seeing Voices
    • The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
    • A Leg to Stand On
    • Awakenings
    • Migraine
  • Inspired by Sacks
  • In News
  • Oliver Sacks Foundation
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Newsletter

Footnote of the Month: July 2010

July 13, 2010 / Kate Edgar / Footnotes

People with alexia can see perfectly well, but their brains lose the ability to decipher words and letters. Howard Engel, the Canadian novelist known for his Benny Cooperman series of detective novels, put it this way:

The July 31, 2001, Globe and Mail looked the way it always did in its make-up, pictures, assorted headlines and smaller captions. The only difference was that I could no longer read what they said. The letters, I could tell, were the familiar twenty-six I had grown up with. Only now, when I brought them into focus, they looked like Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next. Was this a Serbo-Croatian version of the Globe, made for export? . . . Was I the victim of a practical joke? . . . I have friends who are capable of such things. . . . I wondered what I might do to them that would improve on this piece of foolery. Then, I considered the alternative possibility. I checked the Globe’s inside pages . . . I checked the want ads and the comics. I couldn’t read them either. . . .

Panic should have hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. But instead I was suffused with a reasonable, business-as-usual calm. “Since this isn’t somebody’s idea of a joke, then, it follows, I have suffered a stroke.”

from The Mind’s Eye, chapter 3.

Recent Posts

  • A New Oliver Sacks Podcast, Available Now
  • A One-Night-Only U.K. and Ireland Screening of the Oliver Sacks Documentary
  • A classic Oliver Sacks book gets an upgrade.
  • The periodic table in Oliver Sacks’ wallet.
  • Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich, Oliver Sacks documentary on PBS American Masters

Categories

  • Convert
  • Footnotes
  • News

Archives

Search

TELL A FRIEND

  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Inspired
  • In News
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Newsletter

©2022 Oliver Sacks, M.D. :: Site by KPFdigital :: Admin Login

We use cookies to provide you the best experience on our website.
Continued use of this website assumes you're okay with that. See our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy for more info.
Dismiss