And yet there was something a bit odd. He faced me as he spoke, was oriented towards me, and yet there was something the matter – it was difficult to formulate. He faced me with his ears, I came to think, but not with his eyes. These, instead of looking, gazing, at me, ‘taking me in’, in the normal way, made sudden strange fixations – on my nose, on my right ear, down to my chin, up to my right eye – as if noting (even studying) these individual features, but not seeing my whole face, its changing expressions, ‘me’, as a whole. I am not sure that I fully realized this at the time – there was just a teasing strangeness, some failure in the normal interplay of gaze and expression. He saw me, he scanned me, and yet…
‘What seems to be the matter?’ I asked him at length.
‘Nothing that I know of,’ he replied with a smile, ‘but people seem to think there’s something wrong with my eyes.’
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
