Name: Seeing Voices
ISBN: 9780375704079

Seeing Voices

Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect--a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voicesis, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."

What Hacker News says

robocatSep 2025

I highly recommend this to anyone who admires his writing.

I read this a few months back (random find in local library) and it was fascinating to get a glimpse of the man behind the books (my favorite of which is Seeing Voices).

The weirdest part is when he talks about his psychiatric help - I recall he talks about spending all his disposable income on it, and it must have taken a huge amount of his time and energy too.

Reading between the lines it felt like there was a lot of processing about his childhood and his parents. Maybe the genesis of the childhood trauma industry started way back. I don't recall him mentioning anything outrageously shocking from his childhood.

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NelsonMinarNov 2024

There's been a lot written about MVSL. Oliver Sacks' book "Seeing Voices" is a good introduction, it has a chapter or maybe a whole section about it.

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pmoriartyApr 2022

For people interested in this sort of thing, I'd recommend Seeing Voices[1] by Oliver Sacks, in which he writes about spontaneous development of language by people who grew up without it.

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66723.Seeing_Voices

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pmoriartyApr 2022

"Apparently there are some people who do not think at all using language"

Oliver Sacks wrote a great book about this: Seeing Voices[1]

In it he writes about all sorts of people who either never learned language or learned it late in life, and about what that transformation from a non-linguistic world to a linguistic world is like.

Highly recommended.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Voices-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0375704...

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mschrageFeb 2019

Oliver Sack's excellent book "Seeing Voices" seems to argue something slightly different:

"A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his ideas."

To defend the original metaphor: without language, a person might be akin to a Markov chain generated from the relatively small 'corpus' of individual experience.

While the 'well socialized' individual can draw on the vast range of human experiences shared in language. They have access to a much larger corpus.

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robocatJul 2018

> American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English

ASL is an utterly different language from English. Your sentence is equivalent to saying that because a person speaks Cantonese but writes English, Cantonese is the same as English.

"English can be represented through fingerspelling or artificial systems like Signed Exact English or Cued Speech. But these are codes for spoken or written language, not languages themselves." from http://mentalfloss.com/article/13107/7-things-you-should-kno...

It is a common misconception, because English speaking people are generally taught Signed Exact English and see it used for real time translation, but that has no grammatical crossover with ASL.

Oliver Sacks wrote a fabulous book on the subject: Seeing Voices.

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