Oliver Sacks
The famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks's new book is Hallucinations.
From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Please recommend a book that makes science accessible to trade readers, and that has influenced your own work.--Marshal Zeringue
One book that was very influential for me was published in English in 1968, and it’s called The Mind of a Mnemonist, by A. R. Luria. When I started to read the book, I thought it was a novel. Then after a few pages I realized it was a case history, the most detailed I ever read, but so beautifully written, and so full of feeling and pathos and characterization and richness … For me, that combined science and art ideally. That’s my model.
For readers coming to your books for the first time, which would you recommend as a starting point, and why?
I think maybe The Island of the Colorblind. I have a sort of soft spot for it, because it combines different sorts of writing. It has medical writing, but it also has travel writing: going to Micronesia to see this island of colorblind people. I think it’s broader and more colorful than my purely medical books.
You have researched a wide variety of neurological phenomena, including Tourette’s syndrome and migraines. What about when a condition or phenomena speaks to you, and prompts your desire to study it in detail?
Tourette’s syndrome is...[read on]
