- There is at least a thousand YouTubes about Oliver Sacks. I took a sub-subset of Big Think on YouTube below.
- See his site - Oliver Sacks, M.D.
- Look at SSTattler with Face Blindness(Prosopagnosia) and Oliver Sacks: Musicophilia-Strokes, Language and Music.
Oliver Sacks (1933 – 2015) on Using Imagination to See
by BIG THINK EDITORS
Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933 – 2015), a British neurologist and writer, was professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University. He also held the position of "Columbia Artist," which recognized his contributions to art and science. Sacks was diagnosed with terminal metastatic liver cancer in January 2015. He died on 30 August 2015 in his home in Manhattan at the age of 82 from the disease.
The New York Times said of his passing this morning:
"Describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them.
In his emphasis on case histories, Dr. Sacks modeled himself after a questing breed of 19th-century physicians, who well understood how little they and their peers knew about the workings of the human animal and who saw medical science as a vast, largely uncharted wilderness to be tamed."
A Brain That Can't Hear Music
Published on Apr 23, 2012Oliver Sacks discusses some bizarre cases from his most recent book "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain."
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Oliver Sacks Discusses New Topics in Neurology
Published on Apr 23, 2012Oliver Sacks talks about his interest in studies of sensory perception.
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Oliver Sacks on Medicine and Humanism
Published on Apr 23, 2012Looking at the individual behind the disorder with Oliver Sacks.
Question: What is the relationship between medicine and humanism?
Oliver Sacks: When I was a medical student, 50 years ago, one of my professors once said to me, "Sacks, we've had a patient in who's delirious. Go see the delirium in Room 6."
He didn't tell me anything about the human being who was delirious. It was "the delirium" in Room 6. This is partly how doctors speak. Or they say, the appendix in Room 8.
And this turned out to be a very intelligent and delightful old tea planter who spent much of his time in the Far East, and in his delirium, I listened to him for hours in his delirium. And basically an entire life, the events of a life, his journeys, his loves, his passions, his ambitions. Everything was somehow mixed up in his delirium.
And I realized that, in a way, he was presenting an entire life in this sort of strange, confused, incoherent terms. And I started to listen, and after a while, I started to join in and make some comments. It was actually almost like someone being privy to a dream.
But this made me feel very strongly that this wasn't just a delirium, this was a particular human being who was delirious, and one had to address him.
And so, the particular human being has always, always been central for me. It's not enough to say that's a migraine, that's Parkinsonism. You have to say what is life like for this particular person with migraine or Parkinsonism or whatever. How do they experience it? How do they respond?
The human element and talking about life with something, it certainly needs to be in the central part of medicine. I think it used to be in, and then sometimes, this sort of mass medicine and quick diagnosis, and even with things like brain imaging, I think there's a tendency sometimes just to give a diagnosis and forget it. But certainly that people have to live with things.
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Oliver Sacks on Manipulating the Brain
Published on Apr 23, 2012Oliver Sacks discusses changing the brain through meditation, and listening your way to Harvard.
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Oliver Sacks on Charles Darwin
Published on Apr 23, 2012Some of Darwin's most revolutionary ideas were introduced through botany, says Oliver Sacks.
Question: What is your current fascination with Charles Darwin?
Oliver Sacks: A transformed Darwin appeared in 1860, a Darwin who is a beautiful experimentalist and who turned his garden and his conservatories really into an incredible botanical research station.
And he wrote marvelous papers and six marvelous books. One on orchids, one on climbing plants, on insectivorous plants. And these are enchanting books, and also they have a special function and he himself mentioned this because he speaks of his botanical movements as "a flank movement on the enemy." And what did he mean by this? It was very clear in, you know, when The Origin [of Species] came out, that there was outrage because human ancestry and human status was being brought into question. There was a huge upset.
But, with plants, maybe it's okay. Plants are on a different kingdom. If they want to evolve, if natural selection occurs.
And so, in a fascinating way, really Darwinian ideas were introduced through plants and through the botanical books and through botany and evolutionary botany was the first evolution in science.
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Oliver Sacks on Writing
Uploaded on Aug 2, 2011Oliver Sacks discusses the intersection of writing and medicine.
Question: When did you become interested in writing?
Oliver Sacks: I think I'd been interested in writing since when I was 12 or whatever. I've always kept journals, certainly, steadily for the last 60 years. I didn't know how writing and science and medicine could come together or if they would ever come together, but they did seem to come together in the stories of patients in case histories. And I had in fact written my first book on migraine before I encountered these patients at Beth Abraham.
Question: Do you recommend journaling?
Oliver Sacks: I would recommend keeping a journal, period. I haven't thought of it particularly as a happiness-producing device.
For myself, there's always been a need to make some sort of narrative sense and to describe people and events and situations and feelings. I need to keep a journal, partly as an act of clarification, and partly also because it allows my imagination and fantasy free reign, but somehow held within a sort of framework.
I hugely enjoy the act of writing, and I find it absolutely necessary, whether it's keeping a journal or any other sort of writing. I'm certainly unhappy when I can't write. So, for me, writing is a central form of happiness, not specifically keeping a journal.
I think anything, something creative is needed.
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Oliver Sacks and How the iPod Changes Us
Published on Apr 23, 2012The benefits and dangers of iPod listening.
Oliver Sacks: The world has changed so much in the last 10 years.
This is very beautifully bought out in a Philip Roth novel, "Exit Ghost," where Roth's alter ego, who has been living in the country, comes back into New York City in 2004 and he finds that everyone has on iPods, is on cellphones, and that society as he knew it, the human interaction, has more or less disappeared.
Everyone is engrossed in these things which are almost analogous to hallucinations. They're hearing music. They're hearing voices. They're talking.
Three things about iPods. Listen, first, I have an iPod myself. I have all Bach on my iPod. I have the equivalent of 157 CDs on my iPod. As a Bach lover, it's a fantastic privilege to have all Bach in something the size of a matchbox.
However, I don't listen to it in the street. I don't listen to it when I'm driving the car. I don't listen to it when I ride my bicycle, because I need my attention for reality.
I'm frightened at the degree of engrossment which people can have with iPods. And I think they should almost be forbidden to cyclists and pedestrians.
I also wonder whether to separate music from context. Music arose in a communal way. People would sing together, dance together. There would be concerts. There would be churches. There would be living performers.
I think music can become too abstract and too divorced from context if one only listens to an iPod.
It's wonderful that iPods can give so much, but I'm also concerned that they may take people away from musical environments and contexts in which they should have music. I'm a little worried about the isolating and abstracting and also dangerously engrossing qualities of iPods.
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Oliver Sacks on Hallucinations
Uploaded on Jun 14, 2011Oliver Sacks explains the difference between natural and induced hallucinations.
Question: How do you distinguish natural hallucinations from drug-induced hallucinations?
Oliver Sacks: The hallucinogenic drugs always produced visual hallucinations. I think auditory and musical hallucinations are pretty rare. And the visual hallucinations will sometimes start off as geometric patterns and colors, and then one would see landscapes and sometimes enormous crystals or fields of flowers. And I think they were a little bit like opium dreams. Although, in other ways, these drug hallucinations are not like dreams. You're not asleep; they're next to consciousness.
A lot of my awakenings patients, when they took L-dopa for their Parkinson's, would have hallucinations.
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Oliver Sacks Has Questions about the Brain
Uploaded on Jun 1, 2011Neurologist Oliver Sacks identifies what we still don't know about the human brain.
Check out the rest of Oliver Sacks' interview at http://bigthink.com/oliversacks
Question: If you could have one question answered about the human brain, what would it be?
Oliver Sacks: How it works?
I would like to know how the 100 billion neurons in the incessant interactions are able to create this wonderful thing we call thought, feeling, language, humanity, individuality, consciousness.
This is the ultimate brain/mind questions. That's the ultimate question which neurologists; whether it could be answered even in principle, I don't know
I think we're getting closer in some ways. And I hope I live long enough to get some feeling of the answer there.
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Oliver Sacks on the Left and Right Brain
Published on Apr 23, 2012Oliver Sacks explains the different but equal hemispheres of the brain.
Question: How are left and right brains different?
Oliver Sacks: Hemisphere differences are very striking, not only in human beings but many primates and other animals. And its doubleness is partly built into the vertebrate frame so that we have two kidneys and limbs on each sides. We're symmetrical in most ways.
But the two halves of the brain, although normally they always worked together, they do seem rather different in character and function. And that's very much as if the dominant hemisphere, which is usually the left hemisphere of the brain, is concerned especially with logical thought and analysis, and sometimes relatively routine, intellectual routines of one sort and another. And the right half of the brain much more to do with emotion, with novelty, with intuition and, to some extent, with identity.
And one can't really say that one half is more important than the other because they have to come together completely.
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Oliver Sacks on Medical Research
Published on Apr 23, 2012Oliver Sacks discusses sterovision, amusia, and how his books come together.
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