The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Wow someone from a small film school should really work on adapting this in to a short film

This brain of ours is really strange sometimes, but hey, we at least get to have musicogenic epilepsy (the most intriguing case from this book).

some word choices were made

Brains want to boogie
ladies love to feel frisky
do drugs while you're young.

A book with intermittent sparks of engaging storytelling, bogged down by tons of masturbatory exposition on his insights and philosophical references (what an intellectual!). Not a great storyteller but I slogged through because the stories of the patients themselves were fascinating. Three stars.

Dry writing. Don't get me wrong - Dr. Sacks was a hugely popular, influential and brilliant neurologist and his case histories became best-seller books (like this one) - but for me, his writing left a lot to be desired.

This is one of those books that I'll keep mentioning and telling people to read. I already know how annoying i am going to be talking about this book forever. There are so many things I loved about the book. First of all, it is scientific, with all the terms mentioned and the biology explained, you actually know that you're learning something, not just amassing a collection of cool stories to tell. Secondly, all the cases are told with so much humanity, and respect to the patient. It is their story, more than it is the doctor's (Oliver Sacks), which is obvious, but very much lacking in the medical world especially now. Along the way, we're trying to understand what the patients are feeling, and what their needs are, and how they're going to live with their condition, while learning about what caused that condition, and the history and the different theories about it. It is never a boring read, but actually quite emotional.

The human brain is so fascinating, and so complex, but also so fragile. However, with all the possible ways the nerves could start malfunctioning, there's always a way for them to reroute or compensate. Here's the sad part of the book, where even though it shows that every human will find their way to express themselves, or find the universe that will bring them peace, society is rarely patient enough with them to help. Or even when they do find it, it is disregarded, because it doesn't allow them to be a part of this society, because who cares about inner peace, when we need people in this society to do unwanted menial jobs. The case of the Twins (chap.23) actually made me cry. The fact that we just want people with mental illnesses to just be functional enough to be productive, however destructive that is to their personality. I know that's the case of everyone in this system, but there's a certain kind of cruelty to take the only thing that made a person, stuck in his own head, happy, so he'd be “productive” [I'm still angry about chapter 23].

The thing about this book is, that I can talk for hours about each of the 24 chapters, and there will always be more to talk about. So just read the book everyone, it is really important.

PS. Also something that I very much appreciated, is that Oliver Sacks in no way makes you feel that neurology is only a field for doctors. It shows that he wants you to know what's happening in your body, because we all have one. He wants us to understand our inner world. He wants us to know how we all function and how we can disfunction. He just explains all the jargon. I could write forever, but I will stop for now. Will definitely read his other books.

This book is a treasure. I must admit, Oliver Sacks is not the best of writers, his prose can be a bit dry and dare I say clinical at times. But he more than makes up for it with great insight and a host of unparalleled stories about the weird and wonderful world of super-specific neurological conditions. Sack's book is a collection of fairly casually reported highly interesting, clinical cases from his career as a neurologist. At times funny and at times tragic, sacks manages to bring the human element into each of these cases, while also shedding light on how the mind works in the process.

Fascinating stories. Especially, the woman who lost her Proprioception. She lost all sense of her joints location. Close your eyes and touch and you can still touch your finger to your nose. This woman, when she closes her eyes she looses all sense of where her fingers are. She could only move when she could see her limbs. Many other interesting stories but this one stood out.

This is probably peak Oliver Sacks. And you need Oliver Sacks in your life. We lost a very special person when he died in 2015.

This book is Sacks's big-hearted portrayal of a bunch of neuro-atypical case studies, pulled from his experiences as a clinical neurologist working at a bunch of mental hospitals in NYC in the 70s and 80s. Like all of his books, he's a Romantic (big R) naturalist in love with the human mind, and his wide-ranging enthusiasm and respect for both the analytical and emotional/spiritual qualities of his work is always evident. His passion is contagious; his writing is often - dare I say it - divine.

Sacks wrote with enormous affection for the human spirit: I was regularly moved by each case, and not at all in a pitying way. He structures the book around the three (artificial?) categories doctors use for classifying neurological disorders: (1) having deficiencies (e.g. amnesia, agnosia (inability of recognizing things), aphasia (word salad)), (2) having too-much-nesses (e.g. Tourette's, other compulsive/tic behaviors), or (3) being “unintelligent”/mentally challenged. Each case study is both intrinsically fascinating (the titular “man who mistakes” things is amazing) and a moral lesson in how we often misjudge and miss a lot of the complexity behind seemingly intractable afflictions.

Sacks's introduction to the too-much-ness section was especially amazing; I loved hearing about the uneasiness we feel when things feel “too good” - i.e. when the human mind starts whirring too fast as we approach manic, hallucinatory experiences. And I loved Sacks's emphasis, early in the book, on covering maladies of the right hemisphere - since that's our big-R Romantic, mystical, hallucinatory side after all.

Anyway, Sacks is great. Highly recommended. Read his memoir next.

Interesting stories.

Fascinating stories, but the author's meandering writing style makes reading a chore.

I found this hard going. There is no doubt that as someone who has never really thought about Neurology prior to reading this book it could be an interesting subject if some of the the language was not so dense. On the very first page alone we get aphonia, aphemia, alexia with the only other ia mentioned that I knew being amnesia. I have to admit I was under the impression that this was a book for the layman but in truth is was not. Oliver Sacks talked to those that understood. A bit of a missed opportunity in my opinion.

This was a really interesting read for me. I don't really read too many non-fiction novels on my free time, but I intend to change that–especially after reading this book. Oliver Sacks re-sparked my fascination of the Neurobiology field by bringing in a very personal, human narrative to the stories, which many people can relate to. Although it is easy to get lost in the scientific/medical jargon, I hope readers can get past that because I think he does a wonderful job leading his readers through his thought processes.

Bottom line: This is a very thought provoking book, and I can definitely see myself picking it up in the future to reread a couple of the tales.

This book is so dated as to be useless to the casual reader. While the cases it presents may still be interesting for those in the profession to analyze, people reading from a less professional perspective will find nothing of any worth. This book is so full of horrifying 1970's style racism (comparing “savages” to children and “retards” and “simpletons”, calling cases retardeds, simpletons, idiots, and worse, etc) that while some of the information may still be valid today, I cannot take a single word of it seriously. If the author took the time to read and write a forward for the audio edition, why on earth didn't he take the time to go through the text, and at least update some of the worst blunders? Yes, I realize time and language have changed. But that's no reason to perpetuate historical mistakes in what is sold as a popular psych book, especially not when the author is alive and well and could update the text.