Content Summary: In “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks, the idea presented throughout the entire book is that in life we will always face adversity and we can’t control what comes up on our journey through life. Many things happen that are against our will, we must learn from every situation that we face. If we don’t learn, we are bound to repeat. From every situation, we should come out with greater knowledge and understanding.
The first part of the book is about losses and issues that we face. We all deal with problems in our own way, the way that works, or doesn’t work, for us. However, every problem has an ending and a lesson. After every problem we will encounter new ones, and after every lesson there’s another one to be learned. Nothing stays the same in …show more content…
He focuses on finding out the real person inside the patients, he doesn’t define them through their diseases. Sacks engages in ‘neurology of identity,’ a term we studied in class, which means finding out the type of person these patients actually are. He discusses the inability to recognize objects, visual agnosia and the experience of an amnesia stretching back decades, Korsakov’s. Sacks captures the effects of damage to the brain by expanding it to include all the experiences of the individual. His patient, Jimmie, believes that he is 19 years old and living in 1945. Jimmie’s longer term memory stopped dead in 1945. Gilles de la Tourette is a heightened sense that is explained in the book. This disease is “a brain disorder, centered in the ‘old brain’ involving the thalamus, hypothalamus, limbic system and the amygdala” (Butler-Bowdon). This disease is found to have “more than the usual amount of excitor transmitters in their brains, particularly the transmitter dopamine” (Butler-Bowdon). Sacks focuses on the person as a whole, the meaning of the person and their precious inner
The first part of the book is about losses and issues that we face. We all deal with problems in our own way, the way that works, or doesn’t work, for us. However, every problem has an ending and a lesson. After every problem we will encounter new ones, and after every lesson there’s another one to be learned. Nothing stays the same in …show more content…
He focuses on finding out the real person inside the patients, he doesn’t define them through their diseases. Sacks engages in ‘neurology of identity,’ a term we studied in class, which means finding out the type of person these patients actually are. He discusses the inability to recognize objects, visual agnosia and the experience of an amnesia stretching back decades, Korsakov’s. Sacks captures the effects of damage to the brain by expanding it to include all the experiences of the individual. His patient, Jimmie, believes that he is 19 years old and living in 1945. Jimmie’s longer term memory stopped dead in 1945. Gilles de la Tourette is a heightened sense that is explained in the book. This disease is “a brain disorder, centered in the ‘old brain’ involving the thalamus, hypothalamus, limbic system and the amygdala” (Butler-Bowdon). This disease is found to have “more than the usual amount of excitor transmitters in their brains, particularly the transmitter dopamine” (Butler-Bowdon). Sacks focuses on the person as a whole, the meaning of the person and their precious inner