This month is Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month in New York State. The syndrome, characterized by involuntary body movements or vocalizations, was first described in 1885 by the French neurologist Georges…
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New Videos on YouTube!
Spring greetings! We have posted some new videos on Dr. Sacks’s YouTube channel, in which he reacts to the new film based on his work, “The Music Never Stopped.” (If you have…
The Last Hippie and the Grateful Dead
Dr. Sacks’s essay “The Last Hippie” is the basis for the new feature film, The Music Never Stopped, directed by Jim Kohlberg and starring J. K. Simmons, Lou Taylor Pucci, Cara Seymour and…
Music, Metals, and Learning
The Mind’s Eye is available now in English, German, Dutch, and Portuguese (Brazil), with more translations on the way. Dr. Sacks discusses the book, and many other topics, on his…
Footnote of the Month: January 2011
What are the “minor metals,” so-called? They are metals not traded on the London Metal Exchange, but they nonetheless have a wide range of uses essential to modern life. Some…
Wrapping up 2010
Season’s Greetings from the Sacks office! We hope your holidays are full of peaceful moments, firelight (see Dr. Sacks’s piece about his love of fire), and, of course, music (see his tribute…
Giving Thanks for Great Readers!
The Mind’s Eye is a New York Times Editor’s Choice pick this week. Okay, so Keith Richards’ autobiography is number one, but we’re number two! Thank you, New York Times…
The Mind’s Eye is now available!
October 26, 2010 The Mind’s Eye launches today!** In hardcover, large type, e-book, and audio editions. Check out our new YouTube channel for video clips of Dr. Sacks talking about his…
The Mind’s Eye book tour
It’s only a few more weeks until Dr. Sacks’s new book, The Mind’s Eye, is published in hardcover, large print, audiobook and e-book formats—in the United States, Australia, Brasil, the…
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)…
Footnote of the Month: August 2010
Bravo to the Mark Morris Dance Group for their pioneering program bringing music, and dance, to people with Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Sacks first saw the power of music in his…
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…
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…