Encounters with the nonexistent

摘要

Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations opens with something of an apology. The neurologist explains that his book will not focus on cutting-edge brain-imaging studies of what happens during a hallucination or what predisposes individuals to having them; rather, it will concentrate on first-person accounts, with the aim of understanding what it is like to hallucinate. It is as if Sacks worries that such an approach is insufficiently scientific, in an era of functional and structural neuroimaging.