Oliver Sacks "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" (Picador)
The book is a series of case studies of people with severe psychological problems. This makes it quite scary (many of the stories are ‘so-and-so was normal, and then they just lost any sense of where their own limbs were, or the ability to recognize their wife’ and the conclusion to lots of them is ‘they lived with their condition’) and it feels rather dated in places (hard to tell, because I am not at the cutting edge of current psychological research, but I feel that some of the things he authoritatively tells us are not the way we would frame things now) and also a little uncomfortable (he cares for his patients, but there is a deeply paternalistic tone, and also the book is basically a ‘look at the freaky people’). Strangely religious, or at least with more questions about the soul, and whether people are connected to the meaning of the world, than you would expect from a pop science book nowadays.
The first section centres on losses - some patients suffer from disorders which affect the memory, others have lost the ability to undertake normal motor functions, and some have phantom limbs where amputations have occurred. All of the cases are tragic and yet fascinating in equal measure.
The second part focuses on excesses, looking at specific cases of patients with Tourettes, a patient with sudden lack of inhibition brought on by syphilis contracted 70 years previously, and a man considered a riot to all around him, who confabulates in a hilarious manner yet sadly has no true understanding of self remaining.
In 'Transports', Sacks talks about fascinating cases such as the woman who suddenly starts hearing Irish music continuously for months on end, and has previously inaccessible childhood memories awakened by the music. Perhaps my favourite was the case of the man who, after taking mind-bending drugs, had a super heightened sense of smell for a year, to the point where he could sniff out people like a dog.
The final section, 'The World of the Simple', exemplifies just how amazingly complex the human brain is. In many of the cases cited, despite the patients being scientifically considered retarded with very low IQs, they had amazing cognitive abilities, such as the ability to learn 2,000 operas in their entirety, or to instantaneously perform complex mathematical computations. These heightened abilities of siloed intelligence are juxtaposed with their general neurological limitations, and Sacks explains how many such patients can be 'reached' by vehicles such as music, drama, nature and numbers.
But it was an interesting read – the discussion of when things are pathologist and when they make us who we are was fascinating - and a good book for teaching people the word proprioception (from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own", "individual," and capio, capere, to take or grasp, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement).
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a_phoenixdragon for mentioning this article. 
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