Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

 

Reading this book was a rollercoaster ride of learning. I decided to get the book as an audio book so that I could listen and do other things at the same time, and a lot of the listening was done while doing paintings for my other classes. I enjoyed the way that Oliver Sacks would introduce and discuss a case in the present time, but then also include after notes to the chapters if further developments had been made. I’m glad that Sacks did speak of disorders of the right brain, I hadn’t even realized that so many of the “normal” mental disorders were based on the left brain. 

I’d heard the story of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” from discussions in class, so the first story that really struck me was “The Lost Mariner”. I think it was touching because it was so sad. With a lot of the other cases, the patients at least still had a sense of time or present, while this man was wholy living in the past. It was a little scary to think that this could happen to anyone, even due to age and just forgetting things. The patient, Jimmie G., still had a sense of self and still wanted to do work, but was incapable of remembering things day to day. Sacks did mention though that over time, Jimmie G. seemed to learn the layout of the facility he was staying at, or how the garden where Jimmie G. would work seemed to be more family to him because he based the layout of the garden on those he remembered from his childhood. It was tragic to learn that his brother and him had parted ways, even though his brother was really the only one who Jimmie remembered from his life, though encountering his brother was always a shock due to the fact that his brother had aged faster than Jimmie expected due to his lost time. 

The other cases that interested me, and the ones I’m planning on using for my project “Different, not Less”, have to do with partial or full loss of the proprioception. It’s when an individual loses their ability to feel their body parts as a part of themselves, or in the case of one woman, her whole body. The experience of the woman reminds me of depersonalization, which is caused by different things but also comes with the feeling of disconnection from your body. I’ve had a few instances where I have had that floaty body experience due to anxiety attacks so I can’t imagine how odd and scary it must be to go your entire life like that. There’s the other case with the man whose proprioception was damaged and therefore he had lost his sense of balance, having to adjust to living based on visual cues rather than an innate feeling. 

The last case that was particularly interesting to me was “Eyes Right” about the woman who would forget that there is a world to the left of her body. When she is confronted with evidence that things exist to the left of her, she is thrown off and it causes her severe anxiety. This case seemed to be similar to “The Man Who Fell out of Bed”, where the patient could not recognize his leg as his own and would be continuously freaked out by its presence. That sort of loss of part of one’s self , especially the left side (since it’s controlled by the right brain), seems to be fairly common and yet the patient often doesn’t even realize that something is wrong. 

Hearing about all of these cases sort of makes one think, what if there’s something wrong with my right brain and I don’t even realize it? So many of the cases that Sacks mentioned came from individuals who were able to somewhat function in society even though parts of their brain were not working properly. This is both scary but also a testament to how powerful our brain is, and how it can adapt to different situations and learn to function differently.