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…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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….