Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Oliver Sacks "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" (Picador)







Completely changed my philosophy of mind when I first read this book many years ago. It is very accessible, and anecdotal, and takes a look at the ways a person's entire personality or concept of the world can be warped by simple and localized damage to the brain. Sacks is definitely playing the affable old med school prof here, spinning anecdotes into sweet little stories about the strange yet lovable people he's met in his research. Still, his writing is fantastically clear and the stories drag you in, from the man with no long term memory (so much stranger and more affecting than depicted in the movie Memento, and I love that movie), or the loss of the hidden sixth sense of knowing you're in your own body.


Not only that, this book contains an extraordinary collection of cases of individuals with neurological disorders that brings one to understand a bit about how the human brain works. While this book was first published in the early 1970s and the understanding of the human brain mechanism has changed and increased since then, I found this book to be very insightful.

If there's any clear starting point for someone interested in popular cognitive science, it's absolutely here. A little of the science has been surpassed since then, but the basics are all there and, and the discipline's way of looking at the mind is branded into your brain.