One of the benefits that being optimistic has to offer is the ability to take a negative situation and transform it into something that can be useful. Having the mentality of an optimistic individual can lead to a productive lifestyle because something valuable can rise from hopeless circumstances. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and the author of “The Mind’s Eye”, takes an unfortunate situation, like blindness, and shows how people from all over the world embrace being blind through the use of memoirs. From “When I Woke up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday”, by clinical psychologist Martha Stout, the author shares illustrations from her clinical cases discussing the consequences of dissociation and how it affects the lives of people. Even through
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Sacks describes an experiment conducted by some colleagues who claim that, “even in sighted adults, as little as five days of being blindfolded produced marked shifts by nonvisual forms of behavior and cognition, and they demonstrated the physiological changes in the brain” (331). This concept is known as brain plasticity and it is portrayed by many of the memoirs that Sacks introduces, like John Hull. Hull realized that after losing his sight all of his other senses would heighten, allowing him to become more aware of his surroundings. His brain no longer had the luxury to rely on sight to make decisions, so it was forced to change itself in order to move on with life, proving the idea of brain plasticity. Fortunately, for Hull his brain changed for the better, but different situations call for different outcomes, like the clients in Stout’s chapter. Stout explains that, “exposure to trauma may temporarily shut down Broca’s area, the region of the left hemisphere of the brain that translates experience into language, the means by which we most often relate experience to others, and even to ourselves” (421). According to the explanation provided by the quote, it can be concluded that because Broca’s area shuts down, individuals are no longer able to express themselves and do not have ability to say how they feel or what they have been through. Exposure to trauma causes the brain to respond differently in order to cope with what is happening in that moment. Julia is one of Stout’s clients who was abused as a child and in order to preserve her sanity, Julia’s mind went to a different place which in the future provoked her to go into a chronic dissociative state. Julia is a perfect example of someone with a chronic dissociative state. Julia experienced appendicitis, which has the tendency of causing great pain,
Sacks describes an experiment conducted by some colleagues who claim that, “even in sighted adults, as little as five days of being blindfolded produced marked shifts by nonvisual forms of behavior and cognition, and they demonstrated the physiological changes in the brain” (331). This concept is known as brain plasticity and it is portrayed by many of the memoirs that Sacks introduces, like John Hull. Hull realized that after losing his sight all of his other senses would heighten, allowing him to become more aware of his surroundings. His brain no longer had the luxury to rely on sight to make decisions, so it was forced to change itself in order to move on with life, proving the idea of brain plasticity. Fortunately, for Hull his brain changed for the better, but different situations call for different outcomes, like the clients in Stout’s chapter. Stout explains that, “exposure to trauma may temporarily shut down Broca’s area, the region of the left hemisphere of the brain that translates experience into language, the means by which we most often relate experience to others, and even to ourselves” (421). According to the explanation provided by the quote, it can be concluded that because Broca’s area shuts down, individuals are no longer able to express themselves and do not have ability to say how they feel or what they have been through. Exposure to trauma causes the brain to respond differently in order to cope with what is happening in that moment. Julia is one of Stout’s clients who was abused as a child and in order to preserve her sanity, Julia’s mind went to a different place which in the future provoked her to go into a chronic dissociative state. Julia is a perfect example of someone with a chronic dissociative state. Julia experienced appendicitis, which has the tendency of causing great pain,