the man who mistook his wife for a hat book

After Sacks finishes his round of tests, Dr. He is totally perplexed by what the function might be of a leather glove, saying that its five distinct pouches might be a good way to store coins. P a rose, he doesn’t realize that he is holding a rose until he smells it. He can easily judge and identify abstract shapes and even cartoon drawings of faces, and he quickly beats Sacks in a game of mental chess. P can no longer read music, Sacks confirms that he still has a fine-tuned ear for it. Sacks arranges for them to meet a second time, this time in Dr. He also finds it impossible to correctly describe the objects in a landscape photograph, inventing details and images that aren’t there. P reaches down to put his shoes back on and freezes, thinking that his foot is his shoe. When they first meet in Sacks’ office, Dr. P is a genial, good-humored man, and an excellent communicator. He had lost the ability to distinguish faces and is only able to recognize his colleagues and students by their voices.ĭr. For example, he would sometimes pat the top of a fire hydrant or parking meter, thinking that it was a child. P comes to Sacks after a series of incidents wherein he had confused seemingly unmistakable things. P is a distinguished musician who teaches at a school of music in New York. P, the subject of Sacks’ titular story: “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” Dr. He emphasizes that a disease is never a simple loss of function it is also how the patient reacts and compensates as he tries to preserve his identity.

Sacks writes that he is less interested in the traditional left-hemisphere deficits studied by neurology than he is by the questions of self that emerge from right-hemisphere deficits. They are in the unique position of living with an inner reality that is impossible to rationalize or even describe. Hence, patients with right-hemisphere disorders have long gone overlooked. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, has always been considered the more primitive side of the brain, even though its functions form the bedrock of how we construct reality.

Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World, for example, is an account of a young Russian soldier in World War II who survives a catastrophic gunshot through the left side of his head and loses his short-term memory.Īs the hemisphere with more distinct, schematic and quantitative functions, the left side of the brain has easily lent itself to scientific research. Many of the emerging field’s early discoveries had one thing in common: they were the result of studies conducted on damaged left hemispheres. Modern neuropsychology came into being after World War II, due to the joint efforts of Soviet physiologists Alexander Luria, Pyotr Anokhin, and Nikolai Bernstein. 'Losses,' the book’s first of four sections, begins with a short introduction that provides some historical context on the evolution of neuroscience.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat book