In December of 2005, a cancer made its presence suddenly and dramatically known--a melanoma in my right eye, which presented as a sudden incandescence to one side and then a partial blindness....The cancer was irradiated, then lasered several times, because certain areas kept regrowing. During the first eighteen months of treatment, sight fluctuated in my right eye almost daily, from near blind to near normal, and I would be thrown, with these fluctuations, from terror to relief, then back to terror--from one emotional extreme to another.
This would have been hard to bear (and I would have been even harder to live with) had I not become fascinated by some of the visual phenomena which occurred as, bit by bit, my retina--and eyesight--were nibbled away by the tumor and the lasering: the wild topological distortions, the perversions of color, the clever but automatic filling in of blind spots, the incontinent spread of color and form, the continued perception of objects and scenes when the eyes were closed, and, not least, the varied hallucinations which now swarmed in my ever-larger blind spots. My brain was clearly as involved as the eye itself....
Without binocular vision, I now had many new, disabling (but sometimes enthralling!) phenomena to contend with--and investigate....I was not only physically blind but mentally blind, to the right. I could no longer even imagine the presence of what I could no longer see. Such a hemi-neglect, as neurologists call it, is usually the result of a stroke or a tumor in the visual or parietal areas of the brain. For me, as a neurologist, these phenomena were especially fascinating, for they provided an astonishing panorama of the ways in which the brain works (or misworks, or fails to work) when the input from the senses is deficient or abnormal...The whole experience became an experiment with, or on, myself.
The perceptual consequences of my eye damage constituted a fertile ground of enquiry. I felt as if I were discovering as whole world of strange phenomena, although I could not help thinking that all patients with eye problems like mine surely experienced some of the same perceptual phenomena as I did. Writing of my own experiences, then, I would also be writing for them. But the sense of discovery was exhilarating and kept me going through what might otherwise have been rather fearful and demoralizing years, as did my continuing seeing patients and writing.
--from "On the Move", the memoirs of Oliver Sacks.
This would have been hard to bear (and I would have been even harder to live with) had I not become fascinated by some of the visual phenomena which occurred as, bit by bit, my retina--and eyesight--were nibbled away by the tumor and the lasering: the wild topological distortions, the perversions of color, the clever but automatic filling in of blind spots, the incontinent spread of color and form, the continued perception of objects and scenes when the eyes were closed, and, not least, the varied hallucinations which now swarmed in my ever-larger blind spots. My brain was clearly as involved as the eye itself....
Without binocular vision, I now had many new, disabling (but sometimes enthralling!) phenomena to contend with--and investigate....I was not only physically blind but mentally blind, to the right. I could no longer even imagine the presence of what I could no longer see. Such a hemi-neglect, as neurologists call it, is usually the result of a stroke or a tumor in the visual or parietal areas of the brain. For me, as a neurologist, these phenomena were especially fascinating, for they provided an astonishing panorama of the ways in which the brain works (or misworks, or fails to work) when the input from the senses is deficient or abnormal...The whole experience became an experiment with, or on, myself.
The perceptual consequences of my eye damage constituted a fertile ground of enquiry. I felt as if I were discovering as whole world of strange phenomena, although I could not help thinking that all patients with eye problems like mine surely experienced some of the same perceptual phenomena as I did. Writing of my own experiences, then, I would also be writing for them. But the sense of discovery was exhilarating and kept me going through what might otherwise have been rather fearful and demoralizing years, as did my continuing seeing patients and writing.
--from "On the Move", the memoirs of Oliver Sacks.
