Showing results for "Oliver Sacks" in Professionals & Academics

Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

An exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals - including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill.

Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

Lawrence Weschler sets Oliver Sacks' brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks' capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul.

Una serie di casi clinici che ha lo stesso fascino delle Mille e una notte. Con straordinaria empatia e umanità, Sacks racconta le strane storie di pazienti neurologici che hanno perduto un pezzo della loro vita o una parte costitutiva del sé. Come il musicista che carezza distrattamente gli idranti credendo che siano teste di bambini. O il marinaio che è convinto di vivere nel 1945. Il viaggio di un nuotatore "in acque sconosciute, dove può accadere di dover capovolgere le solite considerazioni, dove la malattia può essere benessere e la normalità malattia."

20世紀初頭に大流行した脳炎の後遺症で、言葉や感情、体の自由が奪われてしまった患者が、奇跡の新薬L-DOPAの投与によって目覚める。しかし体の機能回復に加え、人格まで変貌してしまうという怖い副作用が……。

人間の脳が生みだす驚くべき世界　〔見てしまう人びと〕宙を舞うハンカチ、15センチの小人、失った手足の感覚。現実には存在しないものを知覚する「幻覚」。