Austin Kleon — Oliver Sacks on Losing His Stereoscopic Vision

Sacks, fascinating as ever:

I was very conscious of stereo as a wonderful part of the visual world….So it’s an irony that someone like myself has now lost stereo. And having been, I think, in an exceptionally deep world with a rich relief, I now feel myself in a rather flat world. I mean, I infer depth and I know depth and I can manipulate myself perfectly well in a three-dimensional world — walking or driving — but it’s a sort of flatland….Originally when this happened, and this happened very suddenly, I would go to shake hands with people and miss their hand. Or I would go to pour a glass of wine and miss the glass. The first time I did this, I poured all the wine in someone’s lap. He wasn’t very appreciative of that. I find steps and curves particularly challenging. Unless there are other visual cues, they’re just lines on the ground.

She published a lot as a young woman but then became a teacher of English. But then she lost her vision and started hallucinating in her 80s and this started up her poetic voice again. And she published her first book of poems when she was 83. So she was able to use her Charles Bonnet hallucinations very creatively…. Quite a lot of her poems are about the amazing cascade of images which would rush through her mind.

“Sacks says there’s a part of the brain that is specific to recognizing cartoons.”