Gotta Dance!

In Musicophilia, Dr. Sacks writes about music and its therapeutic effects for movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Tourette’s syndrome. His Awakenings patients (who had an extremely rare and severe form of parkinsonism) were frozen, virtually motionless, for decades.  But even when medications failed, they would respond dramatically to music. Astonishingly, although they could not walk, they could dance; though they could not talk, they could sing.

This fall, Britain’s Rambert Dance Company will debut a new dance work inspired by Awakenings, with music composed by Tobias Picker and choreography by Aletta Collins. The piece will have its world premiere in Manchester, England, on September 22, 2010 and tour the UK this fall, with a London opening on November 9, 2010.  Dr. Sacks says he is “thrilled—and honored—that my book was a spark for the firing-up of Tobias Picker’s creative powers. I look forward to seeing this new work inspired by the Awakenings patients.”

While we’re on the subject of dance, kudos to the Mark Morris Dance Group for their pioneering work collaborating with people who have Parkinson’s disease. The MMDG has offered their Dance for PD classes to communities all over the world. (Find out more on NPR’s All Things Considered.) Dance therapy is traditionally aimed at improving mental and emotional health, but it’s great for physical and neurological health as well!

Reading, writing and evolution

Reading and writing: do they go together like love and marriage? Well, it turns out the story is complicated.  Take Howard Engel, a novelist who wrote to Dr. Sacks a few years ago.  He had a stroke that suddenly destroyed, with almost surgical precision, his ability to read.

Uncannily, the stroke did not affect Howard’s ability to write at all. And (as Dr. Sacks’s subjects often do) he came up with a remarkable strategy to continue as a novelist, despite being unable to read what he has just written.

You may have seen Dr. Sacks’s essay about Howard in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, but if you missed it, fear not: the unabridged version is included in The Mind’s Eye. You can also read a little bit in July’s Footnote of the Month.

The center in our brain for understanding and producing language is uniquely human, having evolved some hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how is it that reading, a cultural invention only a few thousand years old, also has a dedicated center in the brain? If evolution didn’t put it there, what did?

We won’t give it all away here, but the answer involves a lot of your favorite characters and ideas, including Darwin and Wallace, Borges and Japanese poetry, the colorblind painter, hyperlexia, musical alexia, the evolution of alphabets, and, of course, amazingly adaptable brains.

SquidMania

Dr. Sacks’s favorite creatures are cephalopods: squids, octopus, cuttlefish, nautilus–all those mollusks that have neurons not only in their heads (cephalo-) but in their feet (-pods) as well. They’re very smart. Dr. Sacks says, ”Cuttlefish have enormous eyes, they are curious and, I think, even affectionate. One cannot help feeling that they have individuality and consciousness, and the basis of an inner life. Cephalopods can learn by observation, as higher mammals do. They are richly endowed with nerve cells: an octopus has 300 million or more neurons, about half in its cerebral ganglia, and the rest distributed among its tentacles. I like cephalopods because they are so removed from us and yet, in some fundamental ways, so like us. They are my favorite aliens.”

Not to mention, they like to swim by jet propulsion (Dr. Sacks has to rely on flippers). And they like to surround themselves with vast clouds of ink (Dr. Sacks was sometimes called “Inky” as a boy, since he was fond of a fountain pen even then). They have quite sophisticated eyes, and their blood is blue. They are better at cloaking themselves than a Klingon warbird. We could go on and on.

So if we were in charge, June would be National Cephalopod Month. You could watch the amazing NOVA program “Kings of Camouflage,” featuring Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole.

Or you could learn more about octopuses in a gorgeously illustrated new book, Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate by Jennifer Mather, Roland Anderson, and James Wood.

Of course, you should do so while wearing your Welcome Squid Overlords t-shirt.  We’re not quite sure how many humans are on the planet these days, but there are even more squid.  Just sayin.’

P.S.: Whew! Squid fossil mystery solved at last.

P.P.S.: For a spectacular meta-list of cephalopods online, check here.

iPad apps, literary journals, science festivals

In a somewhat circuitous way, Dr. Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten has inspired a hot new iPad app by Theodore Gray, of Periodic Table fame. It’s a gorgeous new way to enjoy your elements.

(Prefer your minerals in book form? Theo’s got that covered, too, in The Elements. If you have your lab goggles and blowtorch at the ready, also check out his Mad Science.)

Event-wise, dozens of way cool talks at the World Science Festival will turn New York City into the world capital of science the first weekend of June. For tickets to events, including a conversation on face-blindness between Oliver Sacks, Chuck Close, and Robert Krulwich, check out the WSF site.

On the paper-and-ink front, we’re happy to announce Dr. Sacks’s debut as a contributor to Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, on newsstands now. His piece, “Colorado Springs Revisited,” is in great company–this issue also includes work by Richard Ford, Louis Menand, Morris Dickstein, Rachel Dickinson, Ryan Flaherty, and Dennis Lang.  And that’s only the nonfiction; there are lots more poets, artists, and writers to boot!

The Mind’s Eye coming in October 2010!

Dr. Sacks just delivered the manuscript for his new book, The Mind’s Eye, to his publishers. Alfred A. Knopf will publish the book in the US on October 26, 2010. In the UK, Picador will publish on November 5th, and we also expect Dutch (Meulenhoff) and Brasilian (Companhia das Letras) editions in late 2010, with other translations to follow in 2011.

Check out the beautiful cover design here.

The Mind’s Eye tells the stories of people whose ability to navigate the world visually and to communicate with others is compromised. There is Lilian, a professional pianist who loses her ability to read music and eventually even to recognize everyday objects; and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties. There is Pat, who, although she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, reinvents herself as a great gossip and social butterfly; and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read. There are (surprisingly many) people who have face-blindness; some of them cannot even recognize their own spouse or children. And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side. Finally, Dr. Sacks looks at how blind people may use an astonishing array of other senses to “see” the world.

Cameras are rolling…

Last week, production began on a new feature film based on Dr. Sacks’s essay “The Last Hippie,” in An Anthropologist on Mars.  Jim Kohlberg is directing the indie film, which stars J. K. Simmons (“Up in the Air” and “Juno”), Julia Ormond (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Temple Grandin”), Cara Seymour (“An Education”) and Lou Taylor Pucci (“Brotherhood”).  The screenplay was written by Gwyn Lurie and Gary Marks.  The soundtrack will feature lots of Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and other music from the sixties and seventies. The producers are looking at a fall release date, and we’ll keep you posted!

Dr. Sacks to appear on PBS and The Daily Show!

NOVA: Musical Minds now available on DVD. This hour-long program focuses on Dr. Sacks and some of the patients he wrote about in MUSICOPHILIA.

Watch Dr. Sacks discuss music with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-june-29-2009/oliver-sacks

Good Heavens!

As noted recently in the New York Times, the Committee of Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union has approved the naming of asteroid 84928 as “Oliversacks”!

Dr. Sacks comments:

“I can’t think of a better birthday present! I have always wanted my own asteroid, and now I can say that I am three kilometers in diameter, orbiting the sun every five years, at a distance of roughly 425 million kilometers–this, I guess, is as close as I will ever get to heaven….

I am enormously honored and grateful to Ed Beshore of the Catalina Sky Survey, who discovered (84928) Oliversacks and proposed naming it after me. And I am grateful to my friends Kate Edgar, Marsha Ivins, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who all worked behind the scenes on this birthday honor.” [Dr. Sacks turned 75 on July 9, 2008.]

Neil deGrasse Tyson commented:

“Congratulations, Oliver, on your newly named asteroid. I double checked, before it was selected, to ensure that it was not among those headed for Earth. You can imagine the headlines: ‘Sacked by Sacks’.”

Ed Beshore, Survey Operations Manager, Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona discovered the asteroid in 2003. He noted:

“After the orbit of a newly discovered minor planet is firmly established, the International Astronomical Union gives the discoverer an opportunity to propose a name for it. If approved, this name is permanent and unique, and will be associated with this object in perpetuity. When we found out that Dr. Sacks would be celebrating his 75th birthday this year, the Catalina Sky Survey enthusiastically supported the notion that one of our recent discoveries should bear his name. Being able to recognize the contributions of people like Dr. Sacks in this way is among the most rewarding benefits of our work.”

Honors for Oliver Sacks

Queen Elizabeth II has named Dr. Sacks a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Dr. Sacks says that, having grown up in London, he is thrilled and honored to be recognized by the UK, and he is celebrating by beginning in earnest to write his next book, on vision and the brain. He is also working on an essay about Darwin and botany, and continuing his investigations into schizophrenia and community care.

Stromatolites!

Several of Dr. Sacks’ unusual interests are featured in David Coleman’s article in the New York Times, “In Praise of Early Adapters.” Particular attention is given to stromatolites and other ancient wonders.

Stromatolites, once thought to have been long extinct until a large living colony was discovered in Shark Bay in Western Australia in the mid-1950s, are made up of large colonies of bacteria, often blue-green algae, and sedimentary deposits, which grow naturally in a style that Dr. Sacks likened to a layer cake.

Maybe not the most appetizing cake, but he pointed out that stromatolites are held to be responsible for converting the abundance of carbon dioxide in the earth’s Archean-era atmosphere into oxygen. “Over the years, they made enough oxygen to make life possible for the rest of us,” he said.