Book Thirty Four 2014:
Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
This isn’t the first time I’ve read the always fascinating Dr. Oliver Sacks. I, like many others, started reading him after the movie Awakenings and in the intervening years I’ve made my way through Awakenings itself, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, The Mind’s Eye and now Hallucinations.
It does exactly what it says on the tin and deals with the nature of how and why the human brain hallucinates, talks about why it’s mostly not in people with mental illness but how it happens to so many people and just generally dissects it in a way I hadn’t thought about before.
How much you like this will depend on your interest in the human brain and neurological conditions; mine is fairly infinite. His section on hallucinations in epilepsy is particularly right up my street, obviously.
He’s very much in my “I’d read anything by him” category.