2013 Book Review #33: Hallucinations

[jethrien]

Title: Hallucinations
Author: Oliver Sacks
Genre: Pop science
Thingummies: 2

Synopsis: Oliver Sacks lists and categorizes people's hallucinations.

Thoughts: Ever get stuck talking about the fairly pedestrian dreams of a random stranger, ad nauseum? Yeah, that's this book.

I've read several of Sacks' other books, which are usually good for both giving insight into how our minds work as well as scratching a certain voyeuristic itch. I'm not entirely sure why this book fails at both--perhaps because we don't really understand enough about why we hallucinate. (Or perhaps the answer of "neurons fire when they shouldn't have" is just too simple and not all that interesting.)

The chapters are organized by type. We have hallucinations caused by phantom pain, by drugs, by Parkinsons, when falling asleep, etc. And they basically consist of lists: patient 1 saw zig zags, patient 2 saw random people in Victorian dress, patient 3 saw her dead cat. Nothing really about how this affected their lives or anything. Just "so and so saw x".

Main conclusion: lots of things besides insanity cause people to see/hear/smell things. Many different things. That's about it.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it has a similar problem to a book I read about how NYC de-mafiaed itself, Gotham Unbound. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Nope. It was: this place used to have organized crime. Then cops arrested people. Now it doesn't. Over and over. And it was an expensive book, too!