After reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, I believe Oliver Sacks is a great writer and a psychiatrist. I prefer to think of this book as a memoir rather than a scientific book on psychotherapy. I really like the way he tells it. He uses dialogues with patients when he tells cases. These conversations are detailed and personal, which means I can have empathy and get into the patient’s thoughts. The conversation is usually followed by a diagnosis of the patient. Happily, for me, there isn’t much medical jargon to worry about. Instead, he stands himself in the patients’ viewpoints. To be honest, the conditions that patients face is painful, whether they can perceive it or not. But Dr. Sacks can always keep a positive attitude. This is also the most admirable point. For example, when he talks with the musician, Dr. P, he believed that although Dr. P might not be able to recognize people and objects sometimes, face blindness could give him more inspiration to create art. Jimmie can’t remember what happened after a certain point and has amnesia, but the good old days live on in his heart.

Artistically, the book could help me during creating works of Art & Brain’s projects. Dr. Sacks writes a lot of philosophical and reflective sentences. These sentences are not only about his view of the patient’s life but also about the questions that everyone needs to think about in life. Do we need a so-called right direction in life? Should we move on if we lose it? Or even on the opposite, is living in the past a bad thing? These philosophical questions can be successfully applied in artistic creation, no matter in the format of realism or abstraction.