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I mistook my sock for a wife once.

Seriously though, the dude wrote some great stuff on human perception of music and the brain's processing of musical information.

http://www.oliversacks.com/boo...

Plus, he was kind of a badass:

https://rhystranter.files.word...

http://media.jrn.com/images/b9...

It's sad when one of these bright lights goes out.

...has already written about this phenomenon. http://www.oliversacks.com/books/musicophilia/

It's going to ruin the Facebook experience for people like Oliver Sacks who suffer from face blindness.

I'm sure they'd make Oliver Sacks nostalgic and happy.

All these years later, we know so much about science and technology, but nothing about that feeling of being alive.

But what does it mean to feel alive? Is it our sense of self within our bodies, our emotions, our abilities to know how we fit into the world around us, our intelligence, our memories?

Whatever you choose, somewhere in the world there are people who do not have that attribute due to some disorder or injury. There are people who feel that their bodies (or parts of their bodies) do not belong to them. There are people who cannot feel emotions, or cannot connect with the rest of the world. Pick up any Oliver Sacks book and you will find the stories a lots of people who lack some aspect of the "feeling of being alive".

These people are valuable to scientists, because by seeing how they are different to the rest of us they can understand what makes us who we are. Over the years, these scientists have created drugs to change our emotions and alter our perceptions & desires. They have studied how memories are formed and have even artificially created memories in animal brains.

I think that it is fair to say that science has made great advances in discovering what makes up human. They don't just sit back, scratch their heads and say that it is too hard for them.

You might say that all this takes the joy and magic out of life, but I say just sit back and enjoy the chemical reactions!

You might be thinking of this. This is from the book "An Anthropologist On Mars". Very interesting book.

I have a book by Oliver Sacks called 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' in the book he has a story called 'the twins', both of who are savants who dish out 20 figure primes, amongst other things.

He says, "What is not made clear, by Myers, and perhaps was not clear, is whether Dase had any method for the tables he made up, or whether, as hinted in his simple 'number-seeing' experiments, he somehow 'saw' these great primes, as apparently the twins did.

and goes into a little more detail later on in the book.

I thought the Tom Cruise character in the film Rain Main was loosely based on Dr Oliver Sacks. Turned out I was wrong. However, there are many similar cases of autism described in his great book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat".

This is a fascinating and slightly frightening book. One of the cases there WAS made into a film, Awakenings with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.

Some of the other cases include the title character; a man who keeps adressing his hat as if it was his wife, a woman who has lost all "sense" of her body and feels as if she is trapped in a tomb of someone elses dead flesh, people who can see only details and not wholes, people who are unable to form new memories (exactly like in Memento), people who seem to have lost "nodes" in the "tree" of knowledge that they use to experience and interpret the world.

Great book, defenitely worth a read.

I thought the Tom Cruise character in the film Rain Main was loosely based on Dr Oliver Sacks. Turned out I was wrong. However, there are many similar cases of autism described in his great book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat".

This is a fascinating and slightly frightening book. One of the cases there WAS made into a film, Awakenings with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.

Some of the other cases include the title character; a man who keeps adressing his hat as if it was his wife, a woman who has lost all "sense" of her body and feels as if she is trapped in a tomb of someone elses dead flesh, people who can see only details and not wholes, people who are unable to form new memories (exactly like in Memento), people who seem to have lost "nodes" in the "tree" of knowledge that they use to experience and interpret the world.

Great book, defenitely worth a read.

Oliver Sacks' "An Anthropologist on Mars" contains a (somewhat sad) case study of a patient who had been essentially blind since early childhood, and who had been diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa.

As it turns out the patient really just had severe cataracts, which were then surgically removed. Bingo, the guy could 'see'!

But he had enormous problems adapting to the new inputs his brain was receiving. He wasn't able to interpret depth very well; moving objects terrified him because he couldn't tell how far away they were. In his life he had adapted completely to being blind, and the operation turned out to be something of a mixed blessing.

Here's an excerpt.

As a side note, the book also contains the fascinating story of Temple Grandin, the autistic professor who has huge difficulties with human social interactions but who has made a career out of designing super efficient slaughtering houses that don't panic animals during the process leading up to their deaths.

Check out the book "An Anthropologist on Mars" by Oliver Sacks for a case study of just a person. Here's a site which has a very short synopsis of Sacks' book and, in particular, of the case of "Virgil": http://www.oliversacks.com/mars.html

This is one of the forms of autism where you have a normal or even very high IQ, but no social sense at all (see Oliver Sack's excellent book "An Anthropologist on Mars" for details). Granted there will of course be varying degrees of this, too.

One of the indicators of Asperger's is the inability to read other people's emotions from their faces. This is not necessarily the "geek" case... I consider myself to be a case of mild autism, in the sense that I have coordination problems and had serious social problems for my first 25 years - and even today I often have problems with "implied" social interactions. My wife always fills me in after a conversation on what the person was really thinking - I can read the surface, but not the undercurrents.

As for coordination problems, I gave up on learning to dance. I can't imitate movements other make with their feet, although I have less trouble with hands - I even learned to juggle and know about 20 3-ball tricks. 4 balls seem out of reach, though.

There are several other "geek" symptoms which apply, although the only ones I'd rather be cured of is the dancing problem, and a fear of speaking before large groups of people.

BTW is wearing Birkenstocks a "geek" symptom...? I always liked them, even before reading ESR's jargon file :-)