the man who mistook his wife for a hat summary

Sacks also discusses examples of illnesses that could be construed as benefits-in certain cases, patients have reported that bouts of syphilis left them feeling lively and energetic. Sacks attributes doctors’ low comprehension of Tourette’s to the overly clinical, mechanical formats of most of the tests that neurologists use to examine patients. During that decade, however, the medical establishment gradually came to realize that Tourette’s was very common.

Until the middle of the 1970s, Tourette’s was a relatively unknown disorder, and was thought to be incredibly rare. In Part Two, Sacks discusses several patients who’ve suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. In so doing, he talks about action and the effects of a neurological abundance on a patient’s day-to-day life, rather than talking strictly about the afflicted portion of the brain, as is too often the case in ordinary neurology. In Part Two, Sacks discusses kinds of neurological illness that can be conceived of as abundances of a certain mental process (excesses rather than deficits). train themselves to work around their neurological problems, so that they can live relatively normal lives. Throughout Part One, Sacks shows how patients find ways of compensating for their deficiencies, whether unconsciously or consciously. S., who lost the ability to conceive of “left” after having a stroke. MacGregor, who walks with a tilt because Parkinson’s has prevented his mind from integrating information from the vestibular system and Mrs. P., who has a rare form of face blindness that leaves him unable to distinguish between his wife’s face and his own hat Jimmie G., who has Korsakov’s Syndrome, meaning that he can’t remember anything for more than a few seconds Christina, who loses her sense of proprioception, meaning that she can’t feel her own body Madeline J., who has cerebral palsy and claims to be unable to control her own hands Mr. Patients discussed in Part One include Dr. But Sacks claims that the paradigm of mental illness as a deficit is too narrow-first, because it marginalizes disorders of the right hemisphere of the brain, which can’t easily be understood as a deficit in a specific brain function, and second, because the paradigm underestimates subjects’ abilities to find ways of compensating for mental illness and making up for the “deficit.”

He argues that the medical community tends to define almost all neurological disorders as deficits of some kind.

In Part One, Sacks discusses neurological disorders that can be construed as deficits in an ordinary function of the brain.

Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is divided into four parts, each of which consists of a series of brief case studies centered around some aspect of neurology, the field of science that deals with the nervous system.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat summary