The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks: Steve Silberman writes a beautiful, detailed portrait of erudite neurologist Oliver Sacks on the occasion of the publication of his memoir Uncle Tungsten. The picture of a complex, quirky, intense, cherubic polymath that emerges makes me even more envious than I would have been already that Sacks allowed someone to ‘hang out’ with and write about him for essentially the first time.
Silberman zeroes in on Sacks’ impact in “rescuing the clinical anecdote from the margins of medical practice” and taking our ministrations to our patients beyond mere diagnosis (which Sacks and I agree should be more like the starting point — rather than the ending point it so often is in modern medical practice — in appreciating the person, and their dignified struggle, behind the affliction). In relating Sacks’ interest in descriptive narrative to his lifelong literary aspirations (according to Silberman, one of the things that drew Sacks to the Bay Area in the early ’60’s was the presence of English poet Thom Gunn), I wondered whether Silberman had discreetly refrained from speculating on the extent to which Sacks’ direction had been influenced by something abit more personal. Silberman has previously written about Asperger’s Syndrome for Wired; Sacks of course wrote a memorable and loving depiction of Temple Grandin, a woman with Asperger’s, in the title chapter of his An Anthropologist on Mars; this conjunction may account for Silberman’s acute but nonjudgmental sensitivity to Sacks’ own interpersonal quirkiness. Although I doubt that Sacks himself has Asperger’s and in any case one cannot presume to diagnose sight unseen, it may be that his preoccupation with case history functions as a way to attempt to connect to mysteries of human interaction and meaning that elude him from a position on the sidelines.
Silberman alludes to what appears to be a central mystery in Sacks’ life — his transformation from passionate student of the natural sciences to medical humanist. Is Sacks simply unrevealing — he’s stated he doesn’t plan a memoir similar to Uncle Tungsten of the ‘next phase’ — or himself uninsightful about this? Silberman finds that Sacks is only now turning his case study method to his own mind, although an early Sacks work Silberman doesn’t mention, A Leg to Stand On, explores the internal experience of a neurological calamity that befell Sacks himself in exactly the ways he does for others in Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Anthropologist…. The accident and Sacks’ way of processing it may have been formative as well.
Readers of FmH would expect that I would find this article fascinating. Except for the ‘geek-syndrome’ sideline, and some brief allusions to Sacks’ take on mind-as-computer metaphor, it is not clear to me how appealing this would be to typical Wired readers, however. It seems much more like a New Yorker piece; perhaps we’ll be seeing Silberman’s articulate prose there… Related: Here is Oliver Sacks’ own website.
