Oliver Sacks, "The Mind's Eye"

When Oliver Sacks was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University in 2002 for his life's work of presenting the case histories of patients with neurological diseases, he was praised for his ability to take his readers into the nearly unimaginable mental worlds of those who have suffered brain damage: "Sacks," the awards committee concluded, "presses us to follow him into uncharted regions of human experience-and compels us to realize, once there, that we are confronting only ourselves." This is an extraordinary claim, given that Sacks has written, most famously, about patients who suffered sleeping sickness for decades, about a man who mistook his wife for a hat, and about what it is like to live with Tourette's syndrome, a disease that drives its victims to spew forth curses in public. It has been Sacks's lifelong project to write about the mentally ill in ways that foreground the humanity of those who are suffering from diseases that generate all manner of strange behavior.

Born and educated in England, Sacks has lived in New York since 1965, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine, and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Sacks explained in a recent interview that his interest in the brain and in neurology arose from his childhood experience of visual migraines. "I would often lose sight to one side, and sometimes one can lose the idea of one side in a migraine, which can be a very, very strange thing. When I was young I was sort of terrified of these things. I asked my mother, who was a doctor herself and also had visual migraines. She was the first to explain to me that we are not just cameras-we are not just given the visual world. We make it to some extent."  

The observation of how patients creatively adapt to the challenges an illness poses has shaped Sacks's own approach to medicine, and has led him to create what he has called a "neuroanthropology" of how illness is both perceived and experienced around the world. The author of Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), among other works, Sacks brings together biology and biography in the interests of forging a humane medical practice.  

Sacks, Oliver. "The Mind's Eye." The New Yorker, July 28, 2003. 48-59.
Initial quote drawn from the Rockefeller University Web site. Closing quote drawn from the Salon.com interview with Sacks.
Digital image drawn from the University of Calgary.

Link to Explore:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/sacks_pr.html: An article from Wired magazine about "The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks."

Question for Learning:

• This feature-length article chronicles the career of Oliver Sacks and the many contributions he has made to neuroscience and the medical establishment in general. How has Sacks reinvented and revitalized the "case history"? Why is it important that patients tell their stories, and what are the consequences when these stories are forgotten?

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Question for Connecting:

• In what ways does Sacks's essay complicate or even contradict Gregory Stock's argument in "The Enhanced and the Unenhanced"? On the basis of the evidence that Sacks provides, would you say that intelligence resides primarily in our brains, or is it a product of the ways in which we interact with the world? If intelligence does not reside entirely in our brains, but is also a quality of our behavior, then how likely is it that intelligence might be passed on through or improved by genetic engineering? Is education just as likely as genetic engineering to produce creative, thoughtful, and adaptive people?

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