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!

The power of music to integrate and cure, to liberate the parkinsonian and give him freedom while it lasts . . . is quite fundamental, and seen in every patient. This was shown beautifully, and discussed with great insight, by Edith T., a former music teacher. She said she had become “graceless” with the onset of parkinsonism, that her movements had become “wooden, mechanical—like a robot or doll,” that she had lost her former “naturalness” and “musicalness” of movement, that—in a word—she had been “unmusicked.” Fortunately, she added, the disease was “accompanied by its own cure.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Music,” she explained. “As I am unmusicked, I must be remusicked.” Often, she said, she would find herself “frozen,” utterly motionless, deprived of the power, the impulse, the thought, of any motion; she felt at such times “like a still photo, a frozen frame” . . . without substance or life. In this state, this statelessness, this timeless irreality, she would remain, motionless-helpless, until music came: “Songs, tunes I knew from years ago, catchy tunes, rhythmic tunes, the sort I loved to dance to.”

With this sudden imagining of music . . . the power of motion, action, would suddenly return, [along with a] sense of . . . restored personality and reality. Now, as Edith T. put it, she could “dance out of the frame,” the flat frozen visualness in which she was trapped, and move freely and gracefully: “It was like suddenly remembering myself, my own living tune.” But then, just as suddenly, the inner music would cease, and with this all motion and actuality would vanish, and she would fall instantly, once again, into a parkinsonian abyss.

Equally striking, and analogous, was the power of touch. At times when there was no music to come to her aid, and she would be frozen absolutely motionless in the corridor, the simplest human contact could come to the rescue. One had only to take her hand, or touch her in the lightest possible way, for her to “awaken”; one had only to walk with her and she could walk perfectly, not imitating or echoing one, but in her own way. But the moment one stopped, she would stop too.

From Awakenings, Vintage paperback edition, p. 60.

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.

The July 31, 2001, Globe and Mail looked the way it always did in its make-up, pictures, assorted headlines and smaller captions. The only difference was that I could no longer read what they said. The letters, I could tell, were the familiar twenty-six I had grown up with. Only now, when I brought them into focus, they looked like Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next. Was this a Serbo-Croatian version of the Globe, made for export? . . . Was I the victim of a practical joke? . . . I have friends who are capable of such things. . . . I wondered what I might do to them that would improve on this piece of foolery. Then, I considered the alternative possibility. I checked the Globe’s inside pages . . . I checked the want ads and the comics. I couldn’t read them either. . . .

Panic should have hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. But instead I was suffused with a reasonable, business-as-usual calm. “Since this isn’t somebody’s idea of a joke, then, it follows, I have suffered a stroke.”

from The Mind’s Eye, chapter 3.

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.

Stereopsis, as a biological strategy, is crucial to a diverse array of animals. Predators, in general, have forward-facing eyes, with much overlap of the two visual fields and, presumably, stereoscopic vision; prey animals, by contrast, tend to have eyes at the sides of their heads, which gives them panoramic vision, helping them spot danger even if it comes from behind. An astonishing strategy is found in cuttlefish, whose wide-set eyes normally permit a large degree of panoramic vision but can be rotated forward by a special muscular mechanism when the animal is about to attack, giving it the binocular vision it needs for shooting out its tentacles with deadly aim.

In primates like ourselves, forward-facing eyes have other functions. The huge, close-set eyes of lemurs serve to clarify the complexity of dark, dense close-up foliage, which, if the head is kept still, is almost impossible to sort out without stereoscopic vision—and in a jungle full of illusion and deceit, stereopsis is indispensable in breaking camouflage. On the more exuberant side, aerial acrobats like gibbons might find it very difficult to swing from branch to branch without the special powers conferred by stereoscopy. A one-eyed gibbon might not fare too well—and the same might be true of a one-eyed lemur or cuttlefish.

From The Mind’s Eye, Chapter 5.

(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!

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.

The earliest written languages used pictorial or iconic symbols, which became increasingly abstract and simplified. There were thousands of distinct hieroglyphs in Egypt and tens of thousands of ideograms in classical Chinese; reading (and writing) such a language demands a great deal of training and, presumably, the dedication of a larger portion of the visual cortex. This, Dehaene suggests, may be why most human languages have tended to favor alphabetic systems.

And yet there may be certain powers, certain qualities peculiar to ideograms. Jorge Luis Borges, who was well versed in Japanese poetry, spoke of the multiple connotations of kanji ideograms in an interview:

“The Japanese have achieved a wise ambiguity in their poetry. And that, I believe, is because of their particular form of writing itself, because of the possibilities that their ideograms present. Each one, according to its features, can have several connotations. Take, for example, the word ‘gold.’ This word represents or suggests autumn, the color of leaves, or the sunset because of its yellow color.”

From The Mind’s Eye, Chapter 4.

There is, of course, a “consensus” of the senses—objects are heard, seen, felt, smelt, all at once, simultaneously; their sound, sight, smell, feel all go together. This correspondence is established by experience and association. This is not, normally, something we are conscious of, although we would be very startled if something didn’t sound like it looked—if one of our senses gave a discrepant impression. But we may be made conscious, very suddenly and startlingly, of the senses’ correspondence, if we are suddenly deprived of a sense, or gain one. Thus David Wright “heard” speech, the moment he was deafened; an anosmic patient of mine “smelt” flowers, whenever he saw them (Sacks, 1985); and a patient described by Richard Gregory (in “Recovery from early blindness: a case study,” reprinted in Gregory, 1974) could at once read the time on a clock when he was given his sight (he had been blind from birth) by an eye operation: before that he had been used to feeling the hands of a watch with its watch-glass removed, but could make an instant “transmodal” transfer of this knowledge from the tactile to the visual, as soon as he was able to see.

From Seeing Voices, Vintage paperback edition, p. 133.