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(0)Oliver Sacks
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"Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different...
4) Migraine
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Description
The many manifestations of migraine can vary dramatically from one patient to another, even within the same patient at different times. Among the most compelling and perplexing of these symptoms are the strange visual hallucinations and distortions of space, time, and body image which migraineurs sometimes experience. Portrayals of these uncanny states have found their way into many works of art, from the heavenly visions of Hildegard von Bingen to...
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Description
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far." Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where...
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Description
"Two weeks before his death, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee. The best-selling author of On the Move, Musicophilia, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks is known for his illuminating case histories about people living with neurological conditions at the far borderlands of human experience. But his grasp of science was not restricted to neuroscience or medicine; he was fascinated...
9) Awakenings
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Description
Describes the author's work with institutionalized patients at Mount Carmel Hospital and the dramatic effects of the drug L-DOPA on twenty patients suffering from encephalitic Parkinsonism.
A series of case studies of some of the people who developed a sleeping-sickness after World War I and remained in a sleep state until given the drug L-Dopa. Also describes their lives, the transformation after awakening, and then describes parts of the film made...
Author
Description
Long before Oliver Sacks became a neurologist and one of our finest science writers, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals -- and also by chemical reactions, the louder and smellier the better. His curiosity was encouraged and abetted by brilliantly quirky relatives: Auntie Len, who taught him that the beauty of numbers can be found in the spiral face of a sunflower; Uncle Dave, who invited the boy to his light-bulb factory; and two older...
11) Hallucinations
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Description
"Have you ever seen something that was not really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing? Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. People with migraines may see shimmering arcs of light or tiny, Lilliputian figures of animals and people. People with failing eyesight, paradoxically,...