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The Man Who Forgot How to Read and Other Stories

imagine... Summer 2011
Episode 1 of 6

Alan Yentob meets clinical neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks. Through fascinating case studies, the film explores how humans see, not just with their eyes, but also with the mind.

Presenter Alan Yentob meets clinical neurologist and author Dr Oliver Sacks to investigate the myriad ways we experience the visual world and the strange things that can happen when our mind fails to understand what our eyes see. In the course of this investigation, Yentob tells the life story of Dr Oliver Sacks, the man who would become one of the world's most famous scientists.

Alan delves into this world by going to meet several of the case studies from Sacks latest book, The Mind's Eye.

He meets Stereo Sue, neurobiologist Sue Barry, who always saw the world as a flat 2D image until she suddenly acquired stereoscopic 3D vision in her late forties; Canadian crime writer Howard Engel, the man who forgot how to read, who remarkably continues to write despite a stroke that destroyed his reading ability; Chuck Close, the renowned portrait artist, who cannot recognise or remember faces and Danny Delcambre, an extraordinary and spirited man who, although having a condition which means he was born deaf and is gradually going blind, lives life to the full and uses close-up photography to record the world around him.

Often overlapping with these case studies is Sacks' own story. Here, doctor and patient combine as he talks about his childhood, his own struggle with face blindness, and the loss he felt when eye cancer recently destroyed his 3D vision.

1 hour

Last on

Thu 8 Oct 2015 01:30
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Clip

Music Played

Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes

  • Lambchop

    A Day Without Glasses

  • 麻豆官网首页入口 1996

    Theme from The Mind Traveller

  • Brian Eno

    Small Craft on a Milk Sea

  • Jonny Trunk

    Dead Mouse Blues

  • Brian Eno

    Two Rapid Formations

  • Knife

    N Y Hotel

  • amiina

    Boga

  • Teaism

    Snow Jewel

  • Sigur R贸s

    Straumnes

  • Brian Eno

    Late Anthropocene

  • 脫lafur Arnalds

    Undan hulu

  • 尘煤尘

    Sleep/Swim

  • Yo La Tengo

    Matador

  • amiina

    Seoul

  • J贸nsi & Alex

    Atlas Song

  • Brian Eno

    Lesser Heaven

  • Teaism

    Four PM

  • Max Roach (M' Boom)

    January V

Credits

Presenter Alan Yentob
Producer Louise Lockwood
Director Louise Lockwood
Series Editor Alan Yentob

Broadcasts