Footnote of the Month: March 2010

Last week, production started on a new feature film directed by Jim Kohlberg and based on Dr. Sacks’s essay “The Last Hippie,” in An Anthropologist on Mars.

So we were thinking back to Awakenings, which includes an appendix called “Awakenings on Stage and Screen” about the many dramatic adaptations that book has inspired, including a play by Harold Pinter.  Dr. Sacks worked closely with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams as they were researching their roles for the 1990 feature film “Awakenings.” Here is what he had to say about Robin Williams:

We had spent a few minutes in a very disturbed geriatric ward, where several of the patients were shouting and talking bizarrely, at one point at least six of them together. Later, as we all drove away, Robin suddenly exploded with an incredible playback of the ward, imitating everyone’s voice and style to perfection. It was incredible to hear this: I felt that he must have taken in everything which went on, all the different voices and conversations together, and held them in his mind with total recall – and now he was reproducing them, or, almost, being possessed by them. This instant power of apprehension and playback, a power for which “mimicry” is too feeble a word (for they were funny imitations, feeling ones, and full of creativity), was developed to an enormous degree in Robin. It constituted, I came to think, the first step in his actorial investigation; the one which provided an intense and minute sensory and motor corporeal image, which he could then scan internally and analyse, and then finally imbue with himself, deepen, subjectivise.

I was soon to find this in regard to myself. After our first meeting, Robin “had,” or mirrored, some of my mannerisms, my postures, my gait, my speech; all sorts of things of which I had been hitherto unconscious. It was uncanny, and disconcerting at first, to see myself in this living mirror. We would talk – and the way we stood, and our cadences, our gestures, were the same: it was like suddenly acquiring an identical twin. But then this too-explicit mimesis gave way to a much profounder, much more subjectivised, actor’s portrait of me – or rather of a being half-Robin, half-me, one created by his imagination and feelings, no less than by his observation of me; and finally, to a new character, neither Robin nor me, but one with a life and personality of its own.

From Awakenings, Vintage paperback edition, pp. 376-7.

Footnote of the Month: February 2010

An Anthropologist on Mars takes its title from a comment Temple Grandin once made to Dr. Sacks: that, for someone with autism or Asperger’s syndrome, trying to figure out subtle human emotions is like being . . . an anthropologist on Mars.

Temple’s life is the subject of a stunning new film starring Claire Danes, Julia Ormond, and David Strathairn.  It debuts this Saturday, February 6th, at 8 pm, on HBO.

February’s Footnote of the Month talks about high-functioning autistic people, and originally appeared in An Anthropologist on Mars.

Many high-functioning autistic people describe a great fondness for, almost an addiction to, alternative worlds, imaginary worlds such as those of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, or worlds they imagine themselves. Both the B.’s and their older son have spent years constructing an imaginary world with its own landscapes and geography (endlessly mapped and drawn), its own languages, currencies, laws and customs—a world in which fantasy and rigidity play equal parts. Thus days might be spent computing the total grain production or silver reserves in Leutheria, or designing a new flag, or calculating the complex factors determining the value of a thog—this occupies hours of the B.’s leisure time at home together, Mrs. B. providing the science and technology; Mr. B. the politics, languages, social customs; and their son the natural features of the often-warring countries.

From An Anthropologist on Mars, Vintage paperback edition, p. 276.

Footnote of the Month: January 2010

Why don’t we all have savant talents? In Musicophilia, Dr. Sacks discusses the experimental use of transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily inhibit certain brain functions in order to heighten others. He includes a footnote on his own experiences:

Something perhaps analogous happened to me in 1965, when, like a certain number of medical students and residents at the time, I was taking massive doses of amphetamines. For a period of two weeks, I found myself in possession of a number of extraordinary skills I normally lacked. (I published an account of this, “The Dog Beneath the Skin,” which focused on the heightening of smell, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.)

I could not only recognize everyone I knew by smell, but could hold very accurate and stable visual images in my mind and trace them on paper, as with a camera lucida. My powers of musical memory and transcription were greatly increased, and I could replay complex melodies on my piano after a single hearing. My enjoyment of these newfound powers and the world of greatly heightened sensation that went with them was mitigated, however, by finding that my abstract thinking was extremely compromised. When, decades later, I read of Bruce Miller’s patients and of Allan Snyder’s experiments, I wondered whether the amphetamines might have caused a transient temporal lobe disinhibition and a release of “savant” powers.

(from Musicophilia, Vintage paperback edition, p. 169)