Hallucinations
London : Borzoi Book : 2010Description: 20cm : 322 PagesContent type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volume001: 42346ISBN: 9781447208266Subject(s): Experimental Psychology | Human behavior | PhysiologyDDC classification: 153 SACItem type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 153 SAC (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 112485 |
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153 NAS Rational thinking / | 153 NEI Beyond Good and Evil | 153 SAC The Minds Eye | 153 SAC Hallucinations | 153 SMY Cognition in action / | 153 TAD Power Of Mindset : The Manual To Why Most Successful People Feel Unfulfilled And What To Do Ab | 153.1 HIG Your memory : how it works and how to improve it / |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
Have you ever seen something that wasn't really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing?Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. In some conditions, hallucinations can lead to religious epiphanies or even the feeling of leaving one's own body. Humans have always sought such life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them.In this book, with his usual elegance, curiosity and compassion, Dr Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us 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, a vital part of the human condition.
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Library Journal Review
Physician and prolific author Sacks (The Mind's Eye) gives readers another gem of a book, this time about hallucinations. He discusses his own experiences stemming from migraines or drug use: "My first pot experience was marked by a mix of the neurological and the divine." Hallucinations can involve any of the five senses or memory, or be caused by brain injury. They manifest as sleep paralysis and nightmares, ecstasy and panic, music, haunting images, revenants, and doubles. Sacks's more famous subjects here include Joan of Arc, Dostoyevsky, Freud, and William James. His commentary ranges widely, from hypnosis to post-traumatic stress disorder, imaginary companions to out-of-body experience. VERDICT With a fine sense of narrative, Sacks deftly integrates literature, art, and medical history around his very human, often riveting, case histories. This book is recommended for all readers, not just those with symptoms! This is a model of humane science made compellingly readable. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/12.]-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
Olive Sacks sets himself a challenging task in his latest book: to explore the full range of human hallucinations, those figments of the imagination that terrify, madden, comfort, or merely entertain. Drawing on famous cases, from Joan of Arc to Dostoyevski, Sacks charts a diverse and pervasive phenomenon, one rich in colorful examples caused by trauma, drugs, illnesses, the mind's deterioration, or boredom and the absence of stimuli. The scope of human hallucinations Sacks presents is staggering for its range, myriad causes, and levels of severity. Some hallucinations are little more than distractions: an imagined song in place of silence, a conversation with an absent friend, a light sense of deja vu. For others hallucinations create the fabric of the world in which they live, with the often-frightening images overwhelming reality. The solid performance of Dan Woren, whose business-like narration is the one constant throughout, keeps the listener grounded even during the book's most fantastic passages. Woren offers a brisk reading that when paired with the author's elegant prose guides listeners safely on a long and surreal journey through fantasy and nightmare. A Knopf hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.CHOICE Review
This latest book by prolific author Sacks (Columbia Univ.) is fascinating and illuminating. He brings a clear neurologist's view to a topic discussed over the years in philosophy, psychology, and medicine, and always links what is going on in the mind to what might be happening in the brain--neural discharge, chemical influences, and even the absence of sensory input. At the same time, his narrative accounts provide a vivid and sometimes disturbing picture of what it might be like to have internally constructed sensations interpretable as external ones. The wide range of illusions and hallucinations goes from the visual images of Charles Bonnet syndrome through the ecstatic seizures of temporal lobe epilepsy to the touch/pain images of phantom limbs. Sacks even discusses (while emphasizing these drugs were legal at the time) the illuminating effect of "recreational" drugs on himself. The range and scope of hallucinations give his audience a chance to see how normal these abnormalities are and how people have interpreted and made sense of them. It can even leave "normal" readers a bit wistful that they do not experience any of them, while still better understanding reality and its departures. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through professionals; general readers. J. A. Mather University of LethbridgeBooklist Review
Sacks' best-selling nonfiction stories based on his practice of clinical neurology constitute one shining reason for thinking that we're living in a golden age of medical writing. His twelfth book, though neither as scrappy as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) nor as focused as Musicophilia (2007), yields nothing to them in fascination. It's about the varieties of seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling things that aren't there, from Charles Bonnet syndrome, in which sufferers of vision losses see people, animals, and cartoonlike figures more vividly than their impairments should allow, to the kinds of seeing oneself, which include out-of-body experiences as well as doppelganger encounters. The final chapter (of 15) considers the related phenomena of phantom body parts, which differ from other hallucinations in that they occur immediately and almost invariably after loss of their physical originals. Sacks never talks down to readers nor weighs them down with too much neurological patois. When he does use an unfamiliar term, his genial, informative style makes one want to look it up. High-Demand Backstory: Sacks defines the best of medical writing, and his latest book will be promoted as such.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 BooklistKirkus Book Review
Acclaimed British neurologist Sacks (Neurology and Psychiatry/Columbia Univ.; The Mind's Eye, 2010, etc.) delves into the many different sorts of hallucinations that can be generated by the human mind. The author assembles a wide range of case studies in hallucinations--seeing, hearing or otherwise perceiving things that aren't there--and the varying brain quirks and disorders that cause them in patients who are otherwise mentally healthy. In each case, he presents a fascinating condition and then expounds on the neurological causes at work, drawing from his own work as a neurologist, as well as other case studies, letters from patients and even historical records and literature. For example, he tells the story of an elderly blind woman who "saw" strange people and animals in her room, caused by Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a condition in with the parts of the brain responsible for vision draw on memories instead of visual perceptions. In another chapter, Sacks recalls his own experimentation with drugs, describing his auditory hallucinations. He believed he heard his neighbors drop by for breakfast, and he cooked for them, "put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room--and found it completely empty." He also tells of hallucinations in people who have undergone prolonged sensory deprivation and in those who suffer from Parkinson's disease, migraines, epilepsy and narcolepsy, among other conditions. Although this collection of disorders feels somewhat formulaic, it's a formula that has served Sacks well in several previous books (especially his 1985 bestseller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), and it's still effective--largely because Sacks never turns exploitative, instead sketching out each illness with compassion and thoughtful prose. A riveting look inside the human brain and its quirks.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.There are no comments on this title.