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Is this an essay where you’re observing the observers? As in you’re commenting on Abram and Sacks themselves?

Possibilities:

The main difference between the pieces is that Abram is talking about his own experience of shifting by learning from another culture, and Sacks is reporting on the experiences of others who are shifting focus because of a primary sense loss. Abram loses his shift shortly after leaving the environment, which implies to me that he adopted the perspective of the culture in which he existed. I have little doubt that going back to the environment, Abram would again shift his perception.

The cases which Sacks reports on are permanent conditions of people who, apparently, do not change cultures, but have no choice except to change focus. How the individuals change focus varies.

The pieces are similar in that language and the cultural perceptions built around language must be overcome to describe the focal shifts and reimagined world. In Abram’s piece, language is a temporary barrier — for example, Abram must reconsider the meaning of “spirit” to understand the cultural perspective. Sacks and his subjects have the change of describing their experiences in terms a general, sighted audience can understand to give us any concept of their inner experience.

I would say there is general affirmation between the two regarding the shifting of focus, but Sacks does not appear to mention anything about how the people he is reporting on changed their understanding of their environment, or their emotional relationship to it, only how they adapted to the loss if sight, while Abram points to the return of thinking-in-words as the dominant shift from culturally influenced perception.

IMHO, Abram is talking more about emotional or unconscious perception after redefining his Western-influenced understanding, and Sacks doesn’t go that far.

Hope that helps.

Absolutely.

Sacks’ examples are mostly functional adaptations, similar to controlled experiments where only one factor is changed.

Abram’s experience is affected by culture, language and environment.

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