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…
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Footnote of the Month: July 2010
People with alexia can see perfectly well, but their brains lose the ability to decipher words and letters. Howard Engel, the Canadian novelist known for his Benny Cooperman series of…
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….
Footnote of the Month: June 2010
“Stereo Sue,” a chapter in The Mind’s Eye, is about Sue Barry, a neurobiologist who suddenly acquires stereopsis, and true three-dimensional vision, in her fifties. After a lifetime of inferring…
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…
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….
Footnote of the Month: May 2010
Writing, a cultural tool, has evolved to make use of the inferotemporal neurons’ preference for certain shapes. “Letter shape,” as Stanislas Dehaene writes, “is not an arbitrary cultural choice”—it is…
Footnote of the Month: April 2010
We often talk about which sense we would choose to lose, if we had to give one up. But sometimes, the borderline between senses is not so clear. Dr. Sacks…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
New York Times Migraine Blog
Dr. Sacks’ piece Patterns was posted to the Times Migraine blog last night and has climbed to #3 on the Most Emailed list.
Music: It Does A Body Good
Do you swim to the lilt of a Strauss waltz? Do the Black Eyed Peas keep you on pace? No matter what your musical tastes, a good beat can keep…
Earworms and iPods
Earworms. Brainworms. They’re those catchy little bits of music that get stuck in one’s head and repeat over and over. Steve Silberman interviews Dr. Sacks about them in the October…
Talk of the Town
Dr. Sacks has written a brief piece on “urban ferning” for this week’s Talk of the Town column in The New Yorker (August 13th issue, available now).