Hallucinations

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The "poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) and author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat weaves together stories of mind-altering experiences to reveal what they tell us about our brains, our folklore and culture, and why the potential for hallucination exists in us all.

"Sacks has turned hallucinations from something bizarre and frightening into something that seems part of what it means to be a person. His book, too, is a medical and human triumph." --The Washington Post

"An absorbing plunge into a mystery of the mind." --Entertainment Weekly

To many people, hallucinations imply madness, but in fact they are a common part of the human experience. These sensory distortions range from the shimmering zigzags of a visual migraine to powerful visions brought on by fever, injuries, drugs, sensory deprivation, exhaustion, or even grief. Hallucinations doubtless lie behind many mythological traditions, literary inventions, and religious epiphanies.

Drawing on his own experiences, a wealth of clinical cases from among his patients, and famous historical examples ranging from Dostoevsky to Lewis Carroll, the legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks investigates the mystery of these sensory deceptions: what they say about the working of our brains, how they have influenced our folklore and culture, and why the potential for hallucination is present in all humans.

BUY THE BOOK

352 pages

Average rating: 6.57

7 RATINGS

|

3 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

Anonymous
Mar 23, 2024
4/10 stars
I was entirely disappointed with this book, which is unfortunate because I've read Oliver Sacks before when I was in high school and I found him incredibly engaging. In Hallucinations, though, I didn't felt drawn into any of the clinical cases he discussed at all, and the neuroscience wasn't well explained, or rather, it wasn't well explained in a way where I felt like I wanted to know more or where I was intrigued. Mostly, I was just bored.

There were a couple good chapters I guess ("good" being kind of comparative to the rest of the book), which is why I didn't give this one star, but what I really didn't like about this book was the really long chapter dedicated to Dr. Sacks giving his autobiographical account of his own hallucinations while experimenting with all sorts of drugs when he was younger. He also talked about his own medical hallucinations, which was better, but I just felt like he spent way too much time on his time in the 70s doing drugs and how all that went. That whole bit could have definitely been shortened.

Overall, this book just described random hallucinations through pages and pages and then didn't give information about the causes in an engaging manner, which was unfortunate because as I said earlier, my experience with Dr. Sacks' previous literature has been great.
E Clou
May 10, 2023
8/10 stars
Sacks details all the reasons why someone might have visual, olfactory, or disassociative hallucinations. Most of the conditions he covers are not related to psychosis, meaning the person is often aware that the hallucinations are not real (at first or eventually- though some of these conditions do cause confusion as to what is real and what is not). The book structure and focus seems to be because Sacks is determined to protect patients against a misdiagnosis of psychosis. There is no sense of what the psychosis and non-psychosis percents are though.

I probably didn't need so many real-life examples of all the hallucinations themselves, particularly the repetitive kind- I guess a lot of conditions cause people to hallucinate Lilliputians? Okay, understood.
April C.
Apr 11, 2023
5/10 stars
A very interesting topic, however the book reads like a research paper. My preference would have been more condensed and containing fewer stories.

See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.