Reading :: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
By Oliver Sacks

Like Cheaper by the Dozen, this book came out of the Little Free Library down the street. Amazon lists this version at $46 new, $20 used, so free is quite the bargain.

Sacks was inspired by the work of A.R. Luria, a member of the Vygotsky-Luria Circle and pioneer in neuropsychology, and no stranger to readers of this blog. Sacks calls Luria's works "the greatest neurological treasure of our time" (p.235). So, when Luria actually asked Sacks to write detailed cases about his right-hemisphere brain damage cases, just as Luria had written cases about left-hemisphere cases (p.5), he did. Like Luria's The Man with a Shattered World, these cases, are detailed, poignant, and good representatives of Luria's "romantic science" approach. And I was personally delighted to see so many of Luria's works being referenced, including his twin study. Leontiev and Zaporozhets' book Rehabilitation of Hand Function also gets a mention.

The stories in the book are all fascinating. I'll just mention one. In Ch.7, Sacks reports treating an elderly patient with Parkinson's disease whose vestibular system had been affected. He consequently walked with an unconscious tilt. When he was shown a film of himself walking, he was astounded, but quickly developed a solution: a pair of glasses with a spirit level (or bubble level) built into the frame. The level gave him instant feedback to help him compensate for his vestibular difficulties. Although it was distracting at first, in a couple of weeks this feedback soon became integrated into his actions "like keeping an eye on the instrument panel of one's car" (p.76). What a great example of how people can compensate with external mediation, and how that mediator can become integrated into a new system.