Looking Out To Sea

I finished this at least a week ago, but I’ve been having a hard time putting in to words what I want to say. The book is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It’s a collection of case notes about people he saw over the years in his work as a neurologist. Straightforward enough.

You must read this book.

That’s really all I need to say, though you probably feel a bit more explanation is required. Essentially, the book is a testament to the fragility of our minds. Most of the stuff we understand about the mind (hell, about biology) comes from what we can learn when it breaks. This book is about all the ways it can break.

• There are people who lose all sense of “ideal” entities. The man could hold a glove but only recognise that was soft cloth, that it was a container, that it had five little pouches.
• There are people who lose all sense of their body. The woman did not know what her limbs were doing when she wasn’t looking directly at them.
• There are people who lose all sense of inhibition. The woman would involuntarily mimic every person she saw as she walked down the street.
• There are people who lose huge chunks of their past, or who continually lose the immediate past.

If ever there was a book that showed the mundane, tangible nature of the brain, it is this. Everything that you can think of, every ability you have, is centred somewhere in that bundle of neurons in your skull. And if some of them should fail you could lose your ability to recognise faces, to recognise your own leg or to even understand the concept of “left”, the opposite of “right”. Can you imagine that?