Hallucinations Paperback by Oliver Sacks

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2013-07-02)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 352 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780307402189
• Item Weight: 260.82 grams
• Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.2 x 0.7 cm

From the bestselling author of Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a provocative investigation into hallucinations--auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory--their many guises, their physiological sources, and their personal and cultural resonances.

Hallucinations, for most people, imply madness. But there are many different types of non-psychotic hallucinations caused by various illnesses or injuries, by intoxication--even, for many people, by falling asleep. From the elementary geometrical shapes that we see when we rub our eyes to the complex swirls and blind spots and zigzags of a visual migraine, hallucination takes many forms. At a higher level, hallucinations associated with the altered states of consciousness that may come with sensory deprivation or certain brain disorders can lead to religious epiphanies or conversions. Drawing on a wealth of clinical examples from his own patients as well as historical and literary descriptions, Oliver Sacks investigates the fundamental differences and similarities of these many sorts of hallucinations, what they say about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.

About the Author

OLIVER SACKS was born in 1933 in London and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York. Familiar to the readers of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Dr. Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. Over the years he received many awards, including honours from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. His memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August 2015.