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)

-----------------

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.

<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thejamesrandi-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0684853949&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=AB0919&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr&nou=1" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>

[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.

[Susan Gerbic]

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.

[Brown]

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. ...

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.I was stunned to learn that, according to a report on CNN (http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/04/human-factor-faces-never-familiar-to-famed-doctor/?hpt=Sbin), DOCTOR SACKS HIMSELF HAS THIS CONDITION! In particular, he has prosopagnosia: an inability to recognize individual faces. Further, he has had it since birth.

Consequently, while he was writing about a man who could not recognize faces, he was himself unable to recognize faces.

In the video aired on CNN, Dr. Sacks demonstrated an inability to recognize Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe (although he was able to guess that one photo showed Monroe based upon her attire and pose).

I have not yet settled upon whether I think there ought to have been some disclosure on the part of Dr. Sacks. Should he have made it clear that the person he was writing about was NOT himself (assuming that the unnamed music teacher in the story actually was someone else and not a disguised version of his own experience)? Could it be that the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat actually was Dr. Sacks?

[Susan Gerbic]

Wow I hadn't heard this, how interesting. Maybe he decided on this field of study because he has the problem himself?

Interesting.

[calebprime]

He put in a lot of detail that makes it some unlikely that this was a disguised portrait of himself.

[Brown]

He put in a lot of detail that makes it [seem] unlikely that this was a disguised portrait of himself.I agree, the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was certainly presented as a distinct person, having a history, occupation, family and home different from that of Dr. Sacks. And yet, the tale includes a lengthy discussion of how this man must see the world, as if Dr. Sacks did not know. It now appears that Dr. Sacks DID know, at least to some degree, how this condition presented itself and how it would feel to be a person that had it... because he had it himself.

There is no indication that Dr. Sacks ever suggested to the patient that he (Dr. Sacks) had difficulty in recognizing faces. At times, doctors express empathy with their patients, but Dr. Sacks did not do this (or at least, he did not write about doing so).

It may have been that Dr. Sacks had a milder version of the condition, in that Dr. Sacks could recognize something AS a face, although he could not recognize WHOSE face it was. His patient, by contrast, could not recognize a face as a face, and confused a parking meter and a grandfather clock with persons... and he also mistook his own wife for a hat. Further, the unnamed patient was able to recognize some objects (like the Platonic solids) but was unable to recognize others, notably a flower and a glove. According to the story, Dr. Sacks knew what the flower and glove were, and tried to coach the patient into making educated guesses about what they were. He asked the patient, for example, whether the glove resembled a part of the patient's own body.

What seems especially strange now is the discussion with respect to caricatures. Dr. Sacks reported that he showed the patient a set of drawings (including one that may have been of Jimmy Durante, although Dr. Sacks called him by one variation of Durante's nickname, "Schnozzle"). The patient could recognize the caricatures, in part because the drawings emphasized physical features. Another patient, Dr. Sacks noted, could recognize a student because of the student's distinctive teeth. From his CNN interview, Dr. Sacks indicated that focusing on a prominent physical feature was one of his own techniques for "recognizing" particular people. Again, one wonders whether the man who could recognize a person from his teeth was actually a real patient, or was Dr. Sacks himself.

[Michael C]

He put in a lot of detail that makes it some unlikely that this was a disguised portrait of himself.

I'm sure it's not a disguised portrait of himself. Some years ago I conducted the opera by Michael Nyman based on "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". I remember reading an interview with Michael Nyman (unfortunately I can no longer find it) where he talked about meeting the widow of "Dr. P.". At first she was skeptical about the idea of creating an opera from the case history of her late husband, but allowed the composer and librettist to go on with the project, and if I remember rightly was pleased with the result.

It's certainly interesting to learn that Sacks has prosopagnosia. I think it's likely that this condition played a part in his choice of field of study. The CNN interview shows that Sacks's condition is nowhere near as severe as that of Dr. P.: he has difficulty recognising different faces, but he knows that they are all faces - he wouldn't confuse a hat with a head.

[calebprime]

It sure would be disappointing if it were all made up.

Maybe it's relevant that people with some kinds of right-hemisphere damage can still reproduce details or particular features of drawings, but get the overall shape wrong. So, perhaps this is a not uncommon pattern.