TEDBlog September, 2009 Archive
17 September 2009
Q&A with Oliver Sacks: Hallucinations, neurological curiosities and a passion for understanding
Famed neurologist Oliver Sacks was nice enough to let the TEDBlog into his office for an interview before his talk went up today. He hosted us for over an hour, discussing his new book about vision and the mind and giving details on the visual hallucinations that he’s been experiencing since he lost vision in his right eye. Dr. Sacks proved as interesting as all rumors indicate, with an office full of his hobbies and interests — from his expanding geological collection to an antique crystal radio (made in 1915) and a Wimshurst machine, it was a little oasis for the curious mind.
Well, first of all, it’s lovely to meet you. I think you’re probably very accustomed to people being impressed by your work.
And disappointed when they meet me in the flesh.
(Laughter)
What was TED like for you?
It was a wonderful sort of gathering. You never quite knew what was going to happen next. And there were so many creative people of every sort there. I think it was really rather astounding.
You’re currently writing a new book on hallucinations …
Well, it’s not just hallucinations, but they’ll be about half the book. The current title is The Mind’s Eye and it’s about vision and visions and visual memory, as inspired in the first place by people coming to see me as patients or writing letters. I get something like 200 letters a day, of which I answer about 30. I can’t answer them all. But, I really feel very privileged because people write to me from all over and tell me interesting things that are going on with them. And, in a strange way, as a neurologist, I think I sometimes get my ideas in this way. You know, in health things are seamless. You would have no idea that color and motion and texture and depth are separately processed in the brain, because what we perceive, finally, is a whole visual world. But I often communicate with people who’ve lost just color perception or lost just stereo vision, which shows how things can go wrong. So yes, the hallucinations fascinate me, but mostly because they show how the brain works in everyday life.
But also, as a physician, I need to be in a position to reassure people with a particular sort of hallucination that they’re not going mad. They’re not losing their mind. And the word hallucination has bad vibes. It immediately suggests something ominous. It’s sort of a pity we don’t have another word. Although, curiously, I was just reading an 1824 book called The Philosophy of Apparitions and in those days “apparitions” was used, or “phantoms.” They’re both nice words. You talk about phantom limb, you don’t talk about a hallucinatory leg. Somehow, a phantom limb sounds better.
You wrote this book A Leg to Stand On and it was about your experience of having the leg, but having the feeling of leglessness, the opposite of phantom limb. And now you’re writing many years later about hallucinations and I’ve been told that you’re having some hallucinations yourself, in fact.
Well, I don’t have much vision in the right eye. I had a tumor in the right eye, which has been irradiated and lasered, and I hope laid to rest. But that has taken most of the retina with it on that side and so I’ve only got a little sliver of peripheral vision and the rest is a great black area of scotoma, which changes its appearance as soon as I look up at the ceiling — then it camouflages and turns white, or turns blue if I look at the sky. And it tends to be full of tiny things, of tiny letters and numbers, which look rather like incised hieroglyphics to me, along with a few other simple things like chessboards and spirals and spiders’ webs. So I’m just having fairly simple geometrical hallucinations. I’m not having faces or anything like this, and don’t expect to have them.
But they’re very easy to separate from reality?
Um, yes. Mostly. Although occasionally, I confess, certainly in the early days, when I would perhaps go in to someone’s apartment, I might think, “What an interesting … what a curious stippled wallpaper.” And I’d mention this. And the person would say, “What do you mean stippled? It’s not stippled.” So, now I realize the stippling comes from me, from the visual areas of my brain which area trying to fill in this rather large blind spot.
But with hallucinations that are complex and more plausible and in context, then it can be different. that are complex and more plausible and in context, then it can be different. There’s a historical description, from the Charles Lullin in the 1750s where he first saw a gigantic wheel in mid-air and he thought, “Oh, so that’s a hallucination. We don’t have gigantic wheels in mid-air.” But then his granddaughters came to visit and he said, “Who are these handsome young men with you?” and they looked downcast, because there weren’t any handsome young men. But, there could have been. They were sufficiently plausible.
And it can go the other way around. I got a story about someone who’d become very used to his hallucinations and very cool about it. He lived on the 19th floor of an apartment building, and one day he saw someone hovering outside his window. You don’t have someone hundreds of feet off the ground, so he thought it was a hallucination. And the hallucination apparently waved at him. He paid no attention. And then of course, the window cleaner talked to the person next door and said, “What’s wrong with him? I waved at him and he didn’t respond.” So there, reality was mistaken for a hallucination.
Things like this conjure up, for example, images of that movie A Beautiful Mind, based on the life of John Nash, where the lead character has to learn to recognize what is reality and what is hallucination.
Well, first, that film is quite a long way from the book. There’s a certain distinction from reality — although I know John Nash a little, and, he was quite approving of the book and the film. On the whole, visual hallucinations are not nearly as common in schizophrenia as voice hallucinations. But, the sort of hallucinations I’m dealing with here are very different from psychotic hallucinations. Psychotic hallucinations seem to be often intimately connected with what one is thinking or feeling and they may address one and command one, or accuse one or seduce one. his is unlike the sort of hallucinations that blind people can get, when the brain is not getting its normal input but the visual parts of the brain still stay active and may develop their own output. The people who have these sorts of hallucinations think they see them on a screen or possibly their room, but they don’t interact with the hallucination. When I talked at TED I think I described one patient with this sort of hallucination. I said to her, “Is it like a dream?” And she said, “No, it’s not. It’s like a movie. A rather boring movie.”
So, one of the things I was saying at the beginning and I have to illustrate this, is that I’m writing about something that is a rather different thing than psychotic hallucinations such as John Nash’s. The next book will be about that. Maybe.
People often use say that I study mental illness. But I am not a psychiatrist; I study people with neurological problems and not primarily mental illness as such.
READ MORE: Dr. Sacks discusses his motivation for writing, the photos above his desk, his upcoming operation and his friendship with Francis Crick. (more…)
17 September 2009
2,000 translations for TEDTalks
Late last night, TED volunteer translators Danye West and Tony Yet completed their work on Chris Abani’s 2008 TEDTalk in Simplified Chinese — and in the process, notched the 2,000th translation of a TEDTalk. Since we started TED’s Open Translation Project four months ago, we’ve been thrilled and humbled to see it grow. TEDTalks are now available subtitled in 55 languages, with even more in progress. If you’d like to help translate TEDTalks, learn more here. To watch a TEDTalk that’s been translated, look for the button in the player window that reads “Subtitles” — or, on any Talk page, look for the small red link in the right-hand bar that reads “Open interactive transcript.”
Watch Chris Abani’s musings on humanity, with subtitles in Simplified Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Portuguese (Brazilian):
17 September 2009
What hallucination reveals about our minds: Oliver Sacks on TED.com
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnett syndrome — when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon. (Recorded at TED2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 18:48)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/39
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16 September 2009
An inventory of the invisible: John Lloyd on TED.com
Nature’s mysteries meet tack-sharp wit in this hilarious, 10-minute mix of quips and fun lessons, as comedian, writer and TV man John Lloyd plucks at the substance of several things not seen. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, in Oxford, England. Duration: 10:25)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/36
Watch John Lloyd’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
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15 September 2009
3 warp-speed architecture tales: Bjarke Ingels on TED.com
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels rockets through photo/video-mingled stories of his eco-flashy designs. His buildings not only look like nature — they act like nature: blocking the wind, collecting solar energy — and creating stunning views. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, in Oxford, England. Duration: 18:14)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/34
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15 September 2009
Ray Anderson’s radical confessions: Read an excerpt
Ray Anderson (watch his TEDTalk), the chairman and founder of carpet company Interface Inc., is part of a new industrial revolution: one that demands ecological awareness. Simply conforming to government regulations didn’t satisfy Anderson, who has made the march toward total sustainability an integral part of his company’s customer appeal. For Interface, being “green” is not just a trend or a term, it’s a serious way to curb production costs and make quality flooring.
In 1995 Anderson challenged himself and his employees to hold Interface to the highest ecological standards possible: “to take nothing from the Earth that can’t be replaced by the earth.” Interface proudly promotes its Mission Zero — the company’s goal of achieving total sustainability by the year 2020. This mountain of a task is the subject of Anderson’s new book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. In it, he chronicles the thought process leading to this radical innovation, the opposition faced, and how the results have (so far) validated this turn. The book is a guide for entrepreneurs who are looking for new models of production (especially ones with environmentally friendly attitudes) in a market that’s always reinventing itself.
Interface’s journey is far from over, and Anderson knows this. While he admits that promoting Mission Zero may have given Interface an edge in the market, he still wants to see more companies join the cause. One of his most persuasive techniques are the amazing statistics he drops; such as that since 2003, Interface has “manufactured and sold over 83 million square yards of carpet with no net global-warming effect.”
Anderson’s business perspective comes through in every paragraph; his concern for the planet’s well-being pulses through the page. Ever the optimist, he insists the human species can find a way to be productive and not destructive. The only thing inhibiting this is our own apprehension to hold ourselves to such high standards. This leads to Anderson’s ultimate message: Sticking with the status quo is no longer an option, and we must learn to truly maintain the finite resources we’re lucky to still have.
Read an excerpt from Chapter Two of Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, called “The Power of One Good Question,” which describes the impetus for Interface’s trek up Mount Sustainability. Download the excerpt >>
14 September 2009
Chris Jordan follows the plastic to Midway Atoll
Chris Jordan (watch his TEDTalk) is on Midway Atoll with a team of artists to document a shocking result of our love of plastic: thousands of albatrosses who mistake floating plastic trash for food — and are starving to death. Midway is near the apex of the Pacific Garbage Patch (watch Capt. Charles Moore’s TEDTalk for more on that), and it’s where plastic from all over the world washes up by the ton. From the site:
Five media artists, led by photographer Chris Jordan, are traveling to Midway to witness the catastrophic effect of our disposable culture on some of the world’s most beautiful and symbolic creatures. But even more, they are embarking on an introspective journey to confront a vitally relevant question: In this time of unprecedented global crisis, how can we move through grief, denial, despair and immobility into new territories of acceptance, possibility, and wise action?
Watch for daily updates with photos and video. You can follow the project on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.
Photo from Midway Journey’s Flickr set
14 September 2009
Investigating global crime networks: Misha Glenny on TED.com
Journalist Misha Glenny spent several years in a courageous investigation of organized crime networks worldwide, which have grown to an estimated 15% of the global economy. From the Russian mafia, to giant drug cartels, his sources include not just intelligence and law enforcement officials but criminal insiders. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:30)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/32
Watch Misha Glenny’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
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11 September 2009
Lakshmi Pratury on how she finds speakers for TEDIndia
TEDIndia co-host Lakshmi Pratury is touring India in the months leading up to the conference, on the lookout for the interesting new ideas and trends sprouting all around India. Below, hear her report from Bangalore; and find more video reports from Lakshmi on her site, Lakshmi’s Lounge.
More Lakshmi video: At yesterday’s announcement of the TEDIndia speaker lineup, she gave this short commentary to the Financial Chronicle on how she put together the lineup of speakers for the TEDIndia conference, happening this November in Mysore. The interview comes via the Financial Chronicle’s website mydigitalfc.com. Lakshmi explains that it takes a village to find the best speakers for TED >>
From the same site, TEDIndia speaker Harsha Bogle, the cricket commentator, talks about his plans for the conference >>
Read the TEDIndia speaker lineup >>
Find out more about TEDIndia >>
11 September 2009
Hypnotic music: Vishal Vaid on TED.com
Vishal Vaid and his band explore a traditional South Asian musical form in this mesmerizing improv performance. Sit back and let his music transport you. (Recorded at TED2006, in Monterey, California. Duration: 13:37)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/2y
Watch Vishal Vaid’s performance on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
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