Oliver Sacks is known for his way of communicating ideas about neuroscience in the form of best-selling page-turners. He lived a life as interesting as his patients and he is also Dan's hero. We used this episode not so much to talk about the contents of his books, but the way he communicated how he saw people who were outliers in their neurological perceptions.
The man who mistook his wife for a hat, trying to pick up her head and put it on his own as if it were a totally different object, is the most famous of Oliver Sacks' patients. He represents how human perception is not as black and white as to be thought right or wrong, it's more of a range. Yet the woman's head is a fact of physics; it's not a hat, and nor is it a social construct of the patriarchy, no matter what the American media tells you! We discuss how Oliver Sacks found a balance between objectivity and interpretation, studied interpretations scientifically, and simultaneously managed to treat his patients more like a psychotherapist than a research scientist.
