{"id":6750,"date":"2015-09-03T13:55:03","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T20:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6750"},"modified":"2015-09-13T13:58:35","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T20:58:35","slug":"more-dr-sacks-bc-he-was-such-a-damn-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/09\/03\/more-dr-sacks-bc-he-was-such-a-damn-genius\/","title":{"rendered":"More Dr. Sacks (b\/c he was such a damn genius)"},"content":{"rendered":"

from WIRED<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks<\/h1>\n

by Steve Silberman<\/p>\n

\"\"photo by John Midgley<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Pioneering neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died Sunday, August 30 at age 82. In his writings about patients\u2019 sometimes bizarre case studies\u2014which he would call \u201cneurological novels\u201d\u2014Sacks was able to draw out the humanity in pathology. Steve Silberman wrote about Sacks\u2019 own case study in 2002.<\/em><\/p>\n

One night in<\/span> 1940, a bomb tumbled out of the sky into a garden in North London, exploding into thousands of droplets of white-hot aluminum oxide, which cascaded over the lawn. The buckets of water that the inhabitants of the house at 37 Mapesbury Road\u2014two Jewish doctors and their sons\u2014poured on the fire only fed its chemical vehemence. Amazingly, no one was hurt, but the brilliance of the bomb left an indelible image in the mind of Oliver Sacks, who was 7 years old the night it fell.<\/div>\n

The thermite bomb was the second of two delivered to Mapesbury Road during the war. The first, a 1,000-pound monster, landed next door, but failed to explode. Sacks remembered both scenes vividly while writing the memoir he published last October, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood<\/em>. After the book was published, however, the neurologist and author learned that his memory had deceived him, as memories made unreliable by disorders of the brain had played tricks on the minds of the subjects of his books. His brother Michael told him that, on the night the thermite bomb fell, in fact, they were both away at boarding school.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told him, \u2018But I can see it now<\/em> in my mind. Why?’\u201d Sacks recalled last November. Michael explained that it was because their brother David had written them a dramatic letter about the incident. Even after Sacks accepted this as fact, a visual image of the second bomb still burned in his memory. Looking more deeply, however, he noticed a curious difference between his memories of the two bombs. \u201cAfter the first one fell\u201d\u2014the bomb that didn\u2019t explode\u2014\u201cMichael and I went down the road at night in our pajamas, not knowing what would happen. In that memory, I can feel<\/em> myself into the body of that little boy. And in the second memory\u201d\u2014the thermite bomb\u2014\u201cit\u2019s as if I\u2019m seeing a brilliantly illuminated scene from a film: I cannot locate myself anywhere in the scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sacks has been turning his analytical gaze inward more often these days, after four decades of studying the minds of those with such disorders as autism, Tourette\u2019s syndrome, loss of proprioception, and the sudden onset of color blindness. His tales from the borderlands of the mind, translated into 21 languages, have earned Sacks a worldwide readership. This month, he will be awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, given to scientists who have made a significant achievement in literature, and his insights have been ported to a broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author. His 1973 book, Awakenings<\/em>, inspired both a play by Harold Pinter and a 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Two years ago, a chapter from An Anthropologist on Mars<\/em> also got the Hollywood treatment in a movie called At First Sight<\/em>. His first best-seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat<\/em> (published in 1985), has been turned into a one-act play, an opera, and a theatrical production in French staged by Peter Brook.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at WIRED<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from WIRED The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks by Steve Silberman photo by John Midgley Pioneering neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died Sunday, August 30 at age 82. In his writings about patients\u2019 sometimes bizarre case studies\u2014which he would call \u201cneurological novels\u201d\u2014Sacks was able to draw out the humanity in pathology. Steve Silberman wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}