thu 28/03/2024

Oliver Sacks remembered | reviews, news & interviews

Oliver Sacks remembered

Oliver Sacks remembered

The acclaimed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has died aged 82

Oliver Sacks, peerless explorer of the human brain, has today died of cancer aged 82. Inspired by case histories of patients suffering from neurological disorders, Sacks's eloquent musings on consciousness  which he termed 'neurological novels'  included The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Awakenings, the former adapted into a Michael Nyman opera, the latter an Oscar-nominated film. His combination of intellectual rigour, philosophical expressiveness and powerful compassion illuminated numerous conditions for a readership extending far beyond the medical community. In memory of Sacks, theartsdesk republishes our 2011 review of Imagine: The Man Who Forgot How to Read and Other Stories, BBC Two's glimpse into his remarkable work. 

The man who mistook Oprah Winfrey for Michelle Obama. Or indeed, the man who mistook his own reflection for another distinguished-looking bearded gentleman. Yes, the world’s most famous neurologist, Oliver Sacks, has confessed to “face blindness” - a lifelong inability to recognise faces, even his own face or the faces of the preternaturally famous. Last night’s Imagine found Alan Yentob revisiting Sacks (who he last encountered three years ago for a documentary on the mysteries of musical appreciation) to follow up on this story.

Disappointingly, Yentob didn’t get to the bottom of why Sacks hasn’t talked about his condition before now. It seems odd that someone so obsessed with anomalies in human perception shouldn’t have at some point brought himself into the equation. But Yentob is the most gentle and tactful of interrogators, and so perhaps felt he could just leave it to the viewer to put two and two together, given that Sacks has a new book out called The Mind’s Eye. In it he finally talks about his own eye-related problems while also telling the stories of a number of other individuals who have had to deal with some catastrophic reduction or reconfiguring of what was literally their view of the world.

If you’ve ever read one of Sacks's books you will probably have found it a sobering yet paradoxically exhilarating experience. Sobering, because it could have easily been you enduring your own personal 9/11, and exhilarating because these people are generally fighters making some headway in their journey back to a relatively normal, productive life. Combining real humility with a fearlessly imaginative and adventurous approach to neurology, Sacks always gets to the heart of both the individual and his or her condition, conveying through his lucid, lively prose style what indeed it’s like to be someone who can mistake their wife for a hat.

The new book - and last night’s Imagine - focused on matters of the eye. Although we were soon to realise this was still, essentially, matters of the mind. For a couple of years now, I've personally suffered from a condition where the focal length of my right eye is different to that of the left. So objects appear smaller through one eye than the other, and I almost always feel slightly woozy, presumably from the effort my brain has to make to compensate for this discrepancy. But boy, did I feel lucky to have been afflicted with such a subtle downgrading of my quality of life when I heard some of the stories in this documentary.

Yentob_with_Howard_EngelFor example, one morning novelist Howard Engel (pictured right with Yentob) picked the newspaper up from his front step only to notice that the front page appeared to be written in some kind of Eastern Bloc language. Suspecting that a friend had pulled an elaborate practical joke on him, he riffled through the rest of the paper only to discover the same impenetrable script. It was only when he began to check books, and even shopping lists and other scraps of paper around his house, that he realised that a stroke had plunged him into a nightmarish twilight zone where the written word was no longer available to him. However, because reading and writing are controlled by different parts of the brain, Engels could still write. Yet the problem remained that when he came back to what he’d written, say, half an hour later, it would have morphed into the same inscrutable hieroglyphs.

But perhaps the greatest appeal of a typical Sacks case history (if one can talk of the typical with such remarkable stories), is that the patient – either through ingenuity or some kind of spontaneous physical/mental recalibration – finds some way, if not to recover then to adapt to their condition. Engels used a combination of both. Firstly he worked out that if he traced the lines of the unreadable letters on the page with his finger (thus miming the writing of them) he could actually read them again. Then he refined this process by doing it, at a distance if you will, with his tongue. The novel he subsequently wrote was his most successful to date.

There were several such stories of smiling, unfeasibly courageous and optimistic individuals not willing to accept their heartbreakingly devastating debilitations, until we finally got to Sacks’s own recent ocular disaster. If any more proof were needed that we live in a cruel godless universe it’s the idea that this compassionate life-loving man has now had taken away from him the three-dimensional world we all take for granted. Because the thing is, Sacks actually never did take it for granted. He tells Yentob that he was in fact obsessed with 3D since childhood, spending many hours staring into stereo viewers. Now eye cancer has blinded him in one eye. Rather movingly he occasionally still dreams he can see the world in all its glorious, complex layerings.

Yet his sense of humour was still entertainingly buoyant throughout this fascinating (I nearly wrote “eye-opening” there) programme. There was the occasion when he experienced the inversion of mistaking his own reflection for someone else’s. He was in a restaurant, smoothing his beard into place using what he thought was a mirrored wall. Then he noticed his supposed mirror image wasn’t dutifully echoing his every move. Instead, the other man was looking back at him, puzzled, obviously wondering why Sacks was vainly preening himself while looking him directly in the eye.

There we are back on the eye again. If I learnt one thing from this programme it’s that the eye – as one neurologist put it – is just the tip of the iceberg. It apparently takes half our brain power to just process all that information coming in through those two – allegedly - windows to the soul. Let's hope the rest of this new series of Imagine is as good as this opener.

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