Summary Of The Mind's Eye By Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks’ book The Mind’s Eye is about people and their stories of navigating and communicating with others despite losing things that we take for granted. More specifically, in the chapter A Man of Letters, Sacks introduces it with a guy named Howard Engel, who went to get the newspaper at his front door soon realizing the newspaper was not in the language he spoke. Howard was unable to read, had a difficult time recognizing colors, faces, and everyday objects. His condition was Alexia Sine Agraphia. After another person was diagnosed with a similar condition the doctors soon began to realize it is not just the eyes, but it is part of the brain. Howard was determined to relearn the alphabet and learn how to read again. His condition, never got easier or went away, however he just learned how to cope/solve with his problems. The Wallace Problem is that Wallace became concerned with the contradiction of the human’s brain many abilities, abilities that would be of little use in societies that lacked

Natural selection helped solve the problem explaining to us that we are predisposed to reading and education based on our culture not because God gave us the ability to read. I believe that people are able to read/write from the way they were raised as a child. For example, in kindergarten, first, second grade, and so on we are learning new things about reading/writing. We are able to do that because of our culture/how we are raised not because god taught us how to read/write. It is not something that comes naturally to someone; it is something that has to be taught. I thought experiential selection had an effect on the culture in that our brain is always growing and learning new ideas due to the change in our culture. Both of these ideas help solve the problem for Sacks in that we are taught/learned how to read/write due to a culture not because god gave us the ability to