While sitting and waiting in the doctor's office, I picked up an old copy of the New Yorker and started to thumb through it. There was an article that was written by Oliver Sacks. Now for some reason I knew the name Oliver Sacks, but couldn't figure out why. As I read the article, I remembered (I was supposed to read "The Man who mistook his wife for a hat" but never got around to it.)
The article was one of the most interesting reads that I have in a long time. It was about several patients who woke up one morning and had lost the ability to read while keeping the ability to write (alexia). All of them said something along the lines of, "All the letters look like something from a foreign language that I don't understand." What made some of these patients even more interesting were that they were writers and/or publishers and reading was part of their job.
I wish I had gotten the chance to finish the article before the doctor walked in. I got to the part of the article where one of the patients was trying to see if he could teach himself to recognize words again and teach his mind to understand words the way that a child's brain teaches itself to recognize words and attach meaning to them. Maybe I can read the rest of it on the internet.
And maybe I will finally get around to reading an Oliver Sacks novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment