Oliver Sacks: the bedside interview - neurologist and author - Cover Story - Interview

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1995 by Tom McIntyre

Oliver Sacks is restless. "I'm about eighty hours behind on my sleep right now," he says, ushering us into his hotel suite. The world's most famous neurologist is in San Francisco promoting the publication of An Anthropologist On Mars. Like his two most famous works, Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, his latest book is a fascinating blend of "commemoration " and "vivisection," as Sacks puts it, that explores a variety of neurological disorders through the case histories of seven individuals,

While these poignant stories can be appreciated on one level for their entertainment value, Sacks's intentions are clearly more ambitious. "The study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined, " he writes in his introduction to The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. Sacks believes that the patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology" and endorses a more personal approach to medicine that enables the physician to better understand the mysteries between mind and brain. In our era, Sacks contends, the patient has been relegated from a "who " to a "what" by many physicians.

In person, Sacks embodies many of the characteristics of his books: intelligence, candor, wit, and compassion, with perhaps a dash of the absent-minded professor who has trouble keeping track of his own material world. Ultimately, it is his affection for his patients that ennobles all of Sacks' books. Whether it is the encephalitis patients whom he "awakened" or the Tourette's syndrome and autism patients whose worlds he seeks to comprehend, Oliver Sacks is a healer and a master medical detective.

Tom McIntyre:

You and Mickey Hart, one of the drummers of the Grateful Dead, spoke at a congressional hearing about the healing aspects of music. What are the most vivid examples of this that you've witnessed?

Oliver Sacks:

The first and still the most vivid example for me was the effect of music with some of the post-encephalitis Parkinsonian patients whom I later wrote about in Awakenings. Here you would see people who were either immobile and frozen or who sometimes made rapid accelerated steps, but who really, in a sense, had lost their sense of time and of organization in time. Some of them could immediately dance with music and sing, and music seemed to give them back their tempo, their own rhythm.

TM: You mentioned in Awakenings that the patient often "borrows" the music, in a sense.

OS: Yes. The idea of "borrowing" is very fascinating. I actually had to give evidence in England for one patient, one man, who was accused of following people. What would happen was that he would sort of be frozen until he saw someone going in the right direction, and then he would immediately fall into step with them, and, as it were, borrow their health, their ambulatory rhythm, their direction, and their impetus. He didn't have to touch them. Seeing them was sufficient. And then sometimes if they went in the wrong direction, he would have to hitchhike onto the next person. Similarly, I think one can borrow the rhythm of music, and perhaps much more. But in Parkinsonism, I think there is the Mickey Hart aspect: the rhythm, the dynamic aspect. In Awakenings, I quote one patient whom Jonathan Miller later filmed, a music teacher who said that she felt she had been "un-musiced" by her Parkinson's, and that she needed to be "re-musiced." You know sometimes people call Parkinsonism a "kinetic stutter," and again people who stutter can often sing beautifully. So the first aspect I saw was this sort of rhythmic flow being given back to people whom disease had deprived of it.

TM: How does music affect you personally?

OS: Well, in many different ways. I love and need background music .. whatever one means by that. Sometimes it stimulates me, sometimes it soothes me, sometimes it makes me weep, sometimes it makes me giggle. I don't know why it's so powerful Schubert, especially, sort of tears at me. I've sometimes been liberated from a depression by music, and I've sometimes been haunted by music. So it gets me all sorts of ways. Specifically, when I myself was a patient and had lost the idea of walking after a leg injury, music played an essential part in helping me back. But I find music to be a very powerful mnemonic as well, in the Proustian sense. It brings the past back.

TM: I think you can hear the music in a lot of the best writing. James Joyce, for instance. His sentences have a musical feel to them, and supposedly he had a beautiful tenor singing voice.

OS: And for that matter there's Saul Bellow, whose Dr. Sammler's Planet I'm now reading. Some of the paragraphs, you know they're obviously ... This is a voice: this is the voice of the writer. There's the wit and the observation of the writer and everything else, but there's also the sheer music of the prose. And I think if that music runs through you, you have to sing or write or talk. I tend myself to have two sorts of reading: a rather rapid sort of scanning, a page a second to grab at the content, and then a much lower one which is really internal speaking.