'Awakenings' Dr. Oliver Sachs passes

[waltky]

Granny liked dat movie...

Oliver Sacks, neurologist, 'Awakenings' author, dies at 82
August 30, 2015 — There was the blind man who had the disastrous experience of regaining his sight. The surgeon who developed a sudden passion for music after being struck by lightning. And most famously, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Those stories and many more, taking the reader to the distant ranges of human experience, came from the pen of Dr. Oliver Sacks. Sacks, 82, died Sunday at his home in New York City, his assistant, Kate Edgar, said. In February, he had announced that he was terminally ill with a rare eye cancer that had spread to his liver. As a practicing neurologist, Sacks looked at some of his patients with a writer's eye and found publishing gold. In his best-selling 1985 book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," he described a man who really did mistake his wife's face for his hat while visiting Sacks' office, because his brain had difficulty interpreting what he saw. Another story in the book featured twins with autism who had trouble with ordinary math but who could perform other amazing calculations.

One of the best

Discover magazine ranked it among the 25 greatest science books of all time in 2006, declaring, "Legions of neuroscientists now probing the mysteries of the human brain cite this book as their greatest inspiration." Sacks' 1973 book, "Awakenings," about hospital patients who'd spent decades in a kind of frozen state until Sacks tried a new treatment, led to a 1990 movie in which Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams. It was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Dr. Oliver Sacks speaks at the "Music & the Brain" presentation at the Abyssinian Church at the World Science Festival in New York City

Still another book, "An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales," published in 1995, described cases like a painter who lost color vision in a car accident but found new creative power in black-and-white, and a 50-year-old man who suddenly regained sight after nearly a lifetime of blindness. The experience was a disaster; the man's brain could not make sense of the visual world. It perceived the human face as a shifting mass of meaningless colors and textures. After a full and rich life as a blind person, he became "a very disabled and miserable partially sighted man," Sacks recalled later. "When he went blind again, he was rather glad of it."

'Humanizes illness'

 

[MaryL]

We lost a great man, he was a modest man and brilliant author. His books touched on the frailty of the human mind and questioned many concepts about normality. I will miss him.

 

[Bill Angel]

We lost a great man, he was a modest man and brilliant author. His books touched on the frailty of the human mind and questioned many concepts about normality. I will miss him.

Oliver Sacks, who suffered from prosopagnosia, stated about himself in his book "The Mind's Eye":

I am much better at recognizing my neighbors’ dogs (they have characteristic shapes and colors) than my neighbors themselves. Thus when I see a youngish woman with a Rhodesian ridgeback hound, I realize that she lives in the apartment next to mine. If I see an older lady with a friendly golden retriever, I know this is someone from down the block. But if I should pass either woman on the street without her dog, she might as well be a complete stranger.

His writing brought to mind this photo that I had taken of this woman and her dog.

This woman has her own mental difficulties. She insists that my name is Jack and that I am someone other than who I am. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to convice her that she has me confused with someone else. I just avoid her now if I should spot her out walking her dog.

 

[waltky]

Who are you again?...

Prosopagnosia: How face blindness means I can't recognise my mum
Fri, 01 Jul 2016 - Evie Prichard writes about living with prosopagnosia, a condition which means she can't recognise faces - even her own family's.

When you see someone you know, the easiest way to identify them is by their face - but not everyone can do this. It's thought that one in 50 people may have prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Twenty-four-year-old Evie Prichard, who has the condition, explains what life is like when you struggle to recognise your friends and family. I was 19 when I bumped into a nondescript guy at a party and asked him if he knew an ex-boyfriend who I'd broken up with a couple of months earlier.

Evie Prichard (l) and her mother Mary Ann Sieghart (r)​

The familiar loud shirt and stench of CK One should have been enough to warn me who I was talking to, but instead for some reason they made me think that this stranger was a friend of my ex, who had perhaps borrowed his shirt and cologne. Unfortunately, on this as on many occasions, the sleuthing which accompanies most of my social interactions had let me down - inevitably, that guy was my ex. All he'd done was cut his hair and shave his stubble, but because I was in high heels our height differential was also off. My face blindness means that I rely on cues such as hairstyle and height to tell people apart, and without these I am completely adrift.

In a sense this was a triumph. It certainly deflated his ego a little. But it was also one of many instances in which my face blindness has conspired to make me look like an idiot. To me, a face is like a dream. It's incredibly vivid in the moment, but it drifts apart seconds after I look away until all that's left are the disjointed features and a vague memory of how it made me feel. Living with a brain that lacks this one crucial function can be extremely debilitating, but most of the time it is merely inconvenient and gut-wrenchingly embarrassing.

What is prosopagnosia?

 

[MaryL]

I understand the sad way the physical state of the body effects our mind, I have had epilepsy all my life, and the auras that precede a seizure where of extreme anxiety. Fear on a level you can't imagine, that led to panic attacks in public that took years for me to learn to deal with. The mind is subject to all kinds of maladies. Oliver Sacks is a hero of mine. I will miss him.