None
5 stars
This is a fantastic book for exploring the subtle details of human experience and how wildly they can change as a result of genetics, injury, or psychic trauma. By describing his experience with atypical and disordered minds, Sacks gives a glimpse into what "normal" function is really like.
The strength of this book is all of the anecdotes from real patients with extraordinary conditions. It attempts to give the reader a sense of the lived experience of these patients, and how they manage their symptoms. This is much more powerful than describing what the brain does abstractly, because reality is often stranger than you can imagine, and because any brain condition involves a human life and that personal aspect really matters.
I found this book very insightful, in a particular way. Time and time again Sacks considers people with some specific narrow faculty that is abnormal, then explores the consequences …
This is a fantastic book for exploring the subtle details of human experience and how wildly they can change as a result of genetics, injury, or psychic trauma. By describing his experience with atypical and disordered minds, Sacks gives a glimpse into what "normal" function is really like.
The strength of this book is all of the anecdotes from real patients with extraordinary conditions. It attempts to give the reader a sense of the lived experience of these patients, and how they manage their symptoms. This is much more powerful than describing what the brain does abstractly, because reality is often stranger than you can imagine, and because any brain condition involves a human life and that personal aspect really matters.
I found this book very insightful, in a particular way. Time and time again Sacks considers people with some specific narrow faculty that is abnormal, then explores the consequences of this on broader behavior. What you see is that many basic behaviors (like, say, walking, talking, or eating a plateful of food) require several different faculties working together to solve different parts of the problem. When just one of those faculties is out of line, often the person will carry on producing those behaviors, but in problematic ways that can result in wild and unexpected outcomes (such as literally attempting to wear your wife on your head like a hat). Sometimes patients are disturbed by these strange and irrational changes in themselves, and sometimes they are completely oblivious!
By exploring a range of abnormal brain functions and peculiar edge cases, I learned a lot about what the brain does and does not do, and the ways in which it is both fragile and resilient.
