Seeing Voices
by Oliver Sacks · first published 1989
14mentions
6recommended by
7HN commenters
2013–2025first – last mentioned
86% recommend14% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Accessible introduction to deaf culture and sign languages, covering how children acquire language and why access to a signing community matters; suits readers new to Deaf studies and linguistics.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Essay over doven, hun gebarentaal en sociaal-emotionele problemen.
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This reminds me of the story of Kaspar Hauser[1] (which was made in to a movie by Werner Herzog[2]) and of the fascinating book Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks.[3] In his book, Sacks investigates various cases of children growing up without language, how they cope (or don't cope) with it, how they finally acquire language (if they do), and how…
on “A girl was found living among monkeys in an Indian forest” ↗…can learn a lot about ourselves, language and how we learn from understanding a bit about those born deaf. It really is a big deal and Oliver Sacks gets to the heart of the matter in his excellent book 'Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf': http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0330523643/ A highly recommended read for anyone on HN... The article also mentions nannies. A problem they have that the…
on “Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation” ↗…speaking people are generally taught Signed Exact English and see it used for real time translation, but that has no grammatical crossover with ASL. Oliver Sacks wrote a fabulous book on the subject: Seeing Voices.
on “Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia” ↗…defense, metaphors are criminally underrated in their importance to thinking). - most books by Oliver Sacks, who is more qualified to make statements about the brain than anyone else on this list, but "Seeing Voices" especially, because it really dives into the connection between language and brain development. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary#Re...
on “Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach” ↗For people interested in this sort of thing, I'd recommend Seeing Voices[1] by Oliver Sacks, in which he writes about spontaneous development of language by people who grew up without it. [1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66723.Seeing_Voices
on “Nicaraguan Sign Language” ↗"Apparently there are some people who do not think at all using language" Oliver Sacks wrote a great book about this: Seeing Voices[1] In it he writes about all sorts of people who either never learned language or learned it late in life, and about what that transformation from a non-linguistic world to a linguistic world is like.…
on “How to Quiet Your Mind Chatter (2021)” ↗There's been a lot written about MVSL. Oliver Sacks' book "Seeing Voices" is a good introduction, it has a chapter or maybe a whole section about it.
on “Martha's Vineyard Sign Language” ↗…access to a sign language community are any indication, it's probably the most important factor of all, and I think that was the point of the article. I will quote a section of Oliver Sacks' great book "Seeing Voices" that further illustrates this: The origin of questioning, of an active and questing disposition in the mind, is not something that arises spontaneously, de novo, or directly from the impact of experience;…
on “Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation” ↗Oliver Sack's excellent book "Seeing Voices" seems to argue something slightly different: "A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his ideas." To defend the original…
on “Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences” ↗…recommend this to anyone who admires his writing. I read this a few months back (random find in local library) and it was fascinating to get a glimpse of the man behind the books (my favorite of which is Seeing Voices). The weirdest part is when he talks about his psychiatric help - I recall he talks about spending all his disposable income on it, and it must have taken a huge amount of his time and energy too. Reading…
on “Tumult and Sympathy: The Letters of Oliver Sacks” ↗There is a longer section on the (dis-)connection between thinking and language in the second chapter of Oliver Sacks’ “Seeing Voices” (1989) including accounts by Deaf people, psychological research and philosophical ideas.
on “Watching a “language” develop when kids can’t speak to each other” ↗Oliver Sacks argues in his book Seeing Voices (about sign language, and why it is important that we let the deaf speak it (which, yes, was controversial among the hearing up until a few decades ago)), that this is because our brain evolved to the…
on “Cats That Fetch Are an Evolutionary Mystery” ↗I love all of his books, but for me Seeing Voices has been a life changer in how it shifted my perspective of the world and of how we should treat each other. Not that I would consider myself a terrible person before reading it, but it made me aware…
on “Oliver Sacks on learning he has terminal cancer” ↗…the signposts actually point to. They're having too much fun with their language games. Meanwhile, Sacks is always trying to stay grounded in what we know from research and case studies. For example Seeing Voices describes accounts of the prelingual deaf who acquired sign language later in life, and therefore were able to describe what their experience of acquiring language was like (since childhood amnesia[0]…
on “Cats That Fetch Are an Evolutionary Mystery” ↗