Lynness- Oliver Sacks

Just finished reading Oliver Sacks latest- The Mind's Eye.  It is shorter and more personal than some of his other books: one whole chapter is entirely about his own experience with losing vision in one eye.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'm a nerd.  Makes me want to write to him and ask about my own head.  Maybe the fact that I don't visualize much of what I read is that my reading is so visual instead of oral?  By that I mean that I concentrate on the look of the words on the page rather than speaking them to myself as I read.  I do not have a photographic memory, but- without consciously trying to commit this to memory-  I remembered a word's approximate location on the page and the shape of the word when I later decided to go back to find the word and look it up.  (If my memory were photographic, I could scan my page in memory to find the word I wanted to look up!)  I can't hold an image in memory for very long, and I can't focus in on it- I can recognize people in my "mind's eye", but if I try to examine them more closely or look for more detail my image kind of 'falls apart', even with people I know very well, like my family.  I can draw, but I have to have an object to draw in front of me.  I cannot hold a realistic image in my mind and draw from it.  Sign language is a visual language and to describe location and spatial relationships with sign language, you have to have a visual image of them yourself, which I rarely do.  If I were describing my own living room I imagine I would have a general image, but interpreting for others requires one to place people and object in various places in your signing space so that you can refer to them, and I have a harder time keeping straight where they are, because I have no actual visual construct....

ANYWAY, Oliver Sacks books always make me think about thinking.  Won't it be amazing when we have all the answers about how our minds work?!