'We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.'

 

 

 

So says Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author who has spent decades unlocking the secrets of the human brain.

Born in 1933 to parents who were both doctors, Oliver Sacks’s interest in neurology was sparked when he was two and began to have migraines. ‘I lost vision and colour. Faces became unrecognisable. This gave me an early and frightened sense that the world is constructed by the nervous system and can be misconstrued in all sorts of ways,’  he says.

Describing himself as a Jewish atheist, he says he lost his belief in God early on. At the age of ten he planted two rows of radishes and suggested that if God wanted to prove His existence He would make one row flourish and the other wilt. Both wilted. Since then, Sacks has put his faith in neurological knowledge.

He is concerned with the ways in which individuals survive and adapt to neurological diseases and his books of case histories have been bestsellers around the world.  In telling the stories of his patients, Steve Silberman points out in Wired, Sacks is not just seeking a diagnosis. He is chronicling the patients’ efforts to maintain identity in a world utterly transformed by the disorder. 

‘In Sacks's case histories,’ writes Silberman, ‘the hero is not the doctor, or even medicine itself. His heroes are the patients who learned to tap an innate capacity for growth and adaptation amid the chaos of their disordered minds: the Touretter who became a successful surgeon, the painter who lost his color vision but found an even stronger aesthetic identity by working in black and white. Mastering new skills, these patients became even more whole, more powerfully individual, than when they were "well".’ 

Oliver Sack’s next book will be on visual perception, illusion and hallucination. ‘It’s not what you look at that matters,’ he says. ‘It’s what you see.’

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