The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

[Brown]

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
and Other Clinical Tales

By Oliver Sacks (1985, Harper & Row, 243 pages)

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In the human experience, there is nothing as wonderful, or as strange, as the human brain.

The brain is a remarkable instrument. The brain evaluates, computes, remembers, controls, dreams, recognizes, interprets, imagines, predicts, and performs a myriad of other functions. It is truly difficult to appreciate the capacity and versatility of the human brain.

Curiously, however, one can develop a greater appreciation for the brain when one views the behavior of individuals whose brains are—for lack of a better word—abnormal.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a collection of tales from a neurologist who has studied individuals whose brains differ from those of the majority.

Imagine, for example, a condition in which your brain was unable to recognize human faces, including the faces of people you’d known all your life. Perhaps you’d mistake a grandfather clock for a person, or you’d confuse your shoe with your own foot, or you’d be unable to recognize a rose that you were holding in your hand, although you could recognize it immediately upon smelling its aroma.

These very challenges faced the music teacher whose case of visual agnosia became the lead story in Dr. Sacks’s book. This teacher, looking for his hat, took hold of his wife's head and tried to put it on his own head. He literally mistook his wife for a hat.

We all take for granted the ability to recognized loved ones, to interpret scenes around us. How strange we should be largely unaware of this remarkable ability, until Dr. Sacks describes a person who lacked it.

Imagine now having an impaired sense of proprioception: an inability to know what your own hands or arms or legs are doing. We take it for granted that we are aware of our bodies and can control them without effort, but Dr. Sacks introduces us to a lady who lost her sense of proprioception.

Imagine losing the concept of “left.” Imagine hearing songs all the time in your head, as though someone had left a radio on. Imagine being able to “see” a ten-digit number as being a prime number.

In tale after tale, Dr. Sacks introduces us to patients who have these conditions. Dr. Sacks how the conditions came about, their bizarre consequences, and how people adapt to them.

Imagine that all words in spoken language sound like gibberish, but that you can still deduce meaning from context, feeling and tone. Now imagine that you can understand the words, but that you have no sensitivity to context, feeling or tone. Now further imagine that a group of people, some having the first condition and some having the second, are laughing like fiends as they listen to a speech by President Ronald Reagan. Why are they laughing? Dr. Sacks explains, and his explanation is both funny and disturbing at the same time.

Many of the conditions Dr. Sacks describes have reached the public consciousness. An inability to form new memories, described by Dr. Sacks as a condition affecting a man who thought he was perpetually in 1945, was the basis for the 2000 film “Memento.” Dr. Sacks also describes autistic savants, which have of late been the subject of popular news reports, and Dustin Hoffman portrayed an autistic savant in the 1988 film “Rain Man.” Dr. Sacks also introduces patients having Tourette’s syndrome, and individuals with Tourette’s have recently been the subject of a number of documentaries and television programs.

The stories Dr. Sacks tells are funny, disconcerting, heart-breaking, inspiring, baffling and downright weird, but always enlightening. By describing the experiences of his patients, Dr. Sacks provides valuable insights into the deep mystery and remarkable majesty of the human brain.

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[Kahalachan]

I absolutely loved this book. This has to be the most bizarre collection of true stories you'll ever read. Reading scientific journals can get boring at times and Sacks puts out information in the form of narratives.

[sgf8]

I read this book when I was in my teens, the stories are amazing, but I had a real hard time with the medical terms used throughout. Reading the book again in my 40's I am struck with how interesting the stories are still. But I still had a hard time with the medical terms. Some things never change.

Susan

[Brown]

Here's news from The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/books/01sack.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin) (reg. req'd):Attracted by his breadth of interests, ranging from schizophrenia to music, Columbia University has appointed Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and writer, as its first Columbia artist, a newly created designation.
...
The new appointment will allow Dr. Sacks, the author of 10 books and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, to range freely across Columbia’s departments, teaching, giving public lectures, conducting seminars, seeing patients and collaborating with other faculty members. Many of the details of his appointment have yet to be worked out, but among other things, he will be teaching in the university’s creative writing department as well as at the medical school.
...
Dr. Sacks, 74, was born in London and moved to the United States in the early 1960s. He is perhaps best known as the author of “Awakenings,” which chronicles his treatment of patients with encephalitic lethargica (otherwise known as sleeping sickness) and was made into a 1990 movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Another well-known book is “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” a 1985 collection of essays about various patients with neurological problems.