In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties. There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read. And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading? The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. Yet our world, our civilisation has grown up on a foundation of words - laws, constitutions, treaties, charters, creeds - words that have tamed and liberated in equal measure. Our education, from earliest childhood, emphasises the importance of words. We take the world before our eyes and define it in a verbal language, and in so doing we capture it, understand it, celebrate it. But there are costs. In our reliance on the cold efficency of language we have neglected the wordless ways of the brain. The uniquely complex human mind is capable of the most exquisite images and visions. But visualisation is not merely about sight and the imagined, it is about the way we interact with the world through our five senses. In THE MIND'S EYE Ian Robertson demonstrates how we are underutilising our brain's powers of visualisation. Taking the lessons of hard science, he explains how the brain works and how important visualisation can be. But more importantly, how we can all unleash the awesome power of our brains. Following simple exercises Ian Robertson describes how visualisation can: improve memory and learning power be the key to creative thinking and problem solving offer powerful ways of combating stress fight physical illness and pain enrich musical and artistic experience enhance sporting skill and strength In his trademark accessible and imaginative style, Ian Robertson brings to life the hidden workings of the brain, and teaches us all how we can best capitalise on our inate abilities. A must read for anyone interested in how the brain works, or unlocking our mind's full potential.

This book opens the mind's eye to the inner world - whether as memories, fantasies, dreams, or visions. Over 100 illustrations.

Ian Robertson has always been fascinated by how the mind makes images, for that awesome power directly and deeply affects our lives. All of us "visualize" the world differently, and how we do so dictates the way we feel, remember, and think--and therefore our health, memory, and creativity. In this lively, accessible and fascinating book, Robertson explains that most of us employ language as a basis for visualization. In effect, we think in words more than in images. The result is an imbalance between the logical and the intuitive, between imagery-based thought and language-based thought. Opening the Mind's Eye is both an enlightening and stimulating explanation of how we "see," and a compelling argument for extending the mind's powers to improve the quality of our lives. Like Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, it combines insight and application.

The book provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of current research on cognitive and applied aspects of eye movements. The contents include peer-reviewed chapters based on a selection of papers presented at the 11th European Conference on Eye Movements (Turku, Finland 2001), supplemented by invited contributions. The ECEM conference series brings together researchers from various disciplines with an interest to use eye-tracking to study perceptual and higher order cognitive functions. The contents of the book faithfully reflect the scope and diversity of interest in eye-tracking as a fruitful tool both in basic and applied research. It consists of five sections: visual information processing and saccadic eye movements; empirical studies of reading and language production; computational models of eye movements in reading; eye-tracking as a tool to study human-computer interaction; and eye movement applications in media and communication research. Each section is concluded by a commentary chapter by one of the leading authorities in the field. These commentaries discuss and integrate the contributions in the section and provide an expert view on the most significant present and future developments in the respective areas. The book is a reference volume including a large body of new empirical work but also principal theoretical viewpoints of leading research groups in the field.

An eloquent, accessible survey of the work of the iconic American artist

Images are inscribed in the memory more easily than words, and some remain with the viewer for a lifetime. Combining hindsight, insight and foresight, the chapters in this book turn a spotlight onto various aspects of health, social work and socially engaged arts practice. The visual imagination is evoked in this book to help practitioners see beneath the surface of contentious and problematic issues facing human services today. Risk assessment, child sexual abuse, work-life balance, old age, dementia, substance misuse, recovery, sex work, homelessness, isolation, biography, death and dying, grief, loss, vulnerability, care, and the function of the museum as a preserver of memory, all come under the sustained gaze and examination of the contributors. Grounded in the arts and humanities, the visual sense as a gateway to empathy is explored throughout these chapters. References are included to visual art, curating dramatic performance, poetry, film, dance, photography, diary entries, and public exhibitions. In an age when people increasingly compose their lives by staring into various screens, this book celebrates the visual modality that can humanise services with ‘human-seeings’. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.