What You'll Learn:
For the late British neurologist Oliver Sacks, his patients in the psych ward often inhabited a fantastical world, somewhere between fact and fable. Considered one of the best medical writers of the twentieth century, Sacks sought to write rehumanizing tales of those with an especially-strained relationship with reality.
Key Insights:
- You can have perfect vision and still fail to recognize familiar people and objects if your visual brain is impaired.
- There are strange medical circumstances under which illness brings wholeness and healing brings deprivation.
- Every experience is permanently impressed somewhere in the nervous system—even if it’s not immediately accessible.
- When a person becomes a dog, he becomes engrossed in the present moment, but is unable to think beyond the immediate.
- You know a case study is dehumanizing when you can’t tell if the subject described is a person or a rat.
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