Oliver Sacks The Power Of Context Summary

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The Influential Context Behind Identity Context is the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event or situation. In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Power of Context”, he argues that the context of one’s immediate environment and situation determines actions and behaviors, and not the character a person portrays. Gladwell wants to find to out if there is a “tipping point” in which an idea becomes popular and reaches a critical mass in social structure. However, Oliver Sacks would argue against Gladwell’s point of view in his writing, “The Mind’s Eye”. Sacks introduces his readers to several individuals who adapt to their blindness in adulthood by using their own mind to create their own place in a world that is shut out due to their …show more content…

Gladwell wants his readers to focus on the context of an environment since it plays a major role in how we act. Circumstances around us are constantly changing day in and day out, and as new changes occur in a situation, new influences surface. Gladwell discusses Philip Zimbardo’s experiment at Stanford University, where Zimbardo and his team created a mock prison in the basement of their psychology building. This was done to see why prison atmospheres were so cruel; and if emotions and behavior derive from the environment surrounding an individual. Zimbardo’s conclusion from this experiment simply states “that there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions” (Gladwell 158). Zimbardo overlooks a person’s background, since he or she may face a certain time, place, and condition in which personal identity could be removed. These specific situations do not include an individual’s past, but instead the present context that is in front of them. For instance, the individuals who were chosen to be guards did not act cruel due to how they were brought up, but instead presented themselves in that way that went along with the context of their present surroundings. Nafisi’s essay would affirm Zimbardo’s point that some situations overwhelm an individual causing them to act a certain way. Nafisi lives in a country that …show more content…

As Gladwell writes about a physical environments context promoting certain behaviors, he mentions “…the streets we walk down, the people we encounter- play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act” (162). By this, Gladwell presents how the environment surrounding a person makes that individual’s character shift as they have to fall into the mainstream way of life. No matter their background or internal mentality, the environments context surrounding that person will have a major influence on the overall behavior they portray. Sacks places an argument against Gladwell by stating that actions are dependent on the mentality of an individual. Sacks does not concur with Gladwell since he tries to teach his readers how the blind live based on their own mental perceptions. Sacks uses John Hull as a reference, who felt that “the loss of visual imagery was a prerequisite for the full development, the heightening, of his other senses” (339). Hull used his other senses to control his behavior, and it therefore shaped him into who he is today. The blind are not able to use the context of their everyday environment to influence the behavior they portray. As Sacks and Gladwell take two different sides, Nafisi is able to discuss both

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