Download or read book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And Other Clinical Tales written by Oliver Sacks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores neurological disorders and their effects upon the minds and lives of those affected with an entertaining voice.
Download or read book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat written by Instaread and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-09-21 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PLEASE NOTE: This is key takeaways and analysis of the book and NOT the original book.The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: by Oliver Sacks | Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review Preview: In this 30th anniversary edition of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks, M.D. brings together more than two dozen narratives of patients with many different neurological impairments. The narratives illuminate medical details of the diseases while illustrating how those diseases play out in a patient's thoughts and actions, bringing a more human aspect to the ailments. These neurological impairments take on many forms. Losses can be highly disruptive to a patient's life, such as Jimmie G.'s severe memory loss. However, many patients find ways to adapt to their ailments and recoup those losses in other ways, such as Mr. P., a music teacher who lost his ability to distinguish faces and objects, even mistaking his wife for his hat, who learned to sing to himself to keep from becoming disoriented. And MacGregor, who installed a level on his glasses to enable him to stand upright to correct a persistent lean... Inside this Instaread of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Overview of the book Important People Key Takeaways Analysis of Key Takeaways
Download or read book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks Key Takeaways Analysis Review written by Instaread and published by Instaread Summaries. This book was released on 2015-09-21 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: by Oliver Sacks | Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review Preview: In this 30th anniversary edition of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks, M.D. brings together more than two dozen narratives of patients with many different neurological impairments. The narratives illuminate medical details of the diseases while illustrating how those diseases play out in a patient’s thoughts and actions, bringing a more human aspect to the ailments. These neurological impairments take on many forms. Losses can be highly disruptive to a patient’s life, such as Jimmie G.’s severe memory loss. However, many patients find ways to adapt to their ailments and recoup those losses in other ways, such as Mr. P., a music teacher who lost his ability to distinguish faces and objects, even mistaking his wife for his hat, who learned to sing to himself to keep from becoming disoriented. And MacGregor, who installed a level on his glasses to enable him to stand upright to correct a persistent lean… PLEASE NOTE: This is key takeaways and analysis of the book and NOT the original book. Inside this Instaread of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat:Overview of the bookImportant PeopleKey TakeawaysAnalysis of Key Takeaways
Download or read book Summary of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat written by Instaread Summaries and published by Idreambooks. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside this Instaread of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat:* Overview of the book* Important People* Key Takeaways* Analysis of Key Takeaways
Download or read book An Analysis of Oliver Sacks s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales written by Dario Krpan and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks looked at the cutting-edge work taking place in his field, and decided that much of it was not fit for purpose. Sacks found it hard to understand why most doctors adopted a mechanical and impersonal approach to their patients, and opened his mind to new ways to treat people with neurological disorders. He explored the question of deciding what such new ways might be by deploying his formidable creative thinking skills. Sacks felt the issues at the heart of patient care needed redefining, because the way they were being dealt with hurt not only patients, but practitioners too. They limited a physician’s capacity to understand and then treat a patient’s condition. To highlight the issue, Sacks wrote the stories of 24 patients and their neurological clinical conditions. In the process, he rebelled against traditional methodology by focusing on his patients’ subjective experiences. Sacks did not only write about his patients in original ways – he attempt to come up with creative ways of treating them as well. At root, his method was to try to help each person individually, with the core aim of finding meaning and a sense of identity despite, or even thanks to, the patients’ condition. Sacks thus redefined the issue of neurological work in a new way, and his ideas were so influential that they heralded the arrival of a broader movement – narrative medicine – that placed stronger emphasis on listening to and incorporating patients’ experiences and insights into their care.
Download or read book Hallucinations written by Oliver Sacks and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hallucinations, for most people, imply madness. But there are many different types of non-psychotic hallucination caused by various illnesses or injuries, by intoxication--even, for many people, by falling sleep. From the elementary geometrical shapes that we see when we rub our eyes to the complex swirls and blind spots and zigzags of a visual migraine, hallucination takes many forms. At a higher level, hallucinations associated with the altered states of consciousness that may come with sensory deprivation or certain brain disorders can lead to religious epiphanies or conversions. Drawing on a wealth of clinical examples from his own patients as well as historical and literary descriptions, Oliver Sacks investigates the fundamental differences and similarities of these many sorts of hallucinations, what they say about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.
Download or read book Another Day in the Frontal Lobe written by Katrina Firlik and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-06-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Katrina Firlik is a neurosurgeon, one of only two hundred or so women among the alpha males who dominate this high-pressure, high-prestige medical specialty. She is also a superbly gifted writer–witty, insightful, at once deeply humane and refreshingly wry. In Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Dr. Firlik draws on this rare combination to create a neurosurgeon’s Kitchen Confidential–a unique insider’s memoir of a fascinating profession. Neurosurgeons are renowned for their big egos and aggressive self-confidence, and Dr. Firlik confirms that timidity is indeed rare in the field. “They’re the kids who never lost at musical chairs,” she writes. A brain surgeon is not only a highly trained scientist and clinician but also a mechanic who of necessity develops an intimate, hands-on familiarity with the gray matter inside our skulls. It’s the balance between cutting-edge medical technology and manual dexterity, between instinct and expertise, that Firlik finds so appealing–and so difficult to master. Firlik recounts how her background as a surgeon’s daughter with a strong stomach and a keen interest in the brain led her to this rarefied specialty, and she describes her challenging, atypical trek from medical student to fully qualified surgeon. Among Firlik’s more memorable cases: a young roofer who walked into the hospital with a three-inch-long barbed nail driven into his forehead, the result of an accident with his partner’s nail gun, and a sweet little seven-year-old boy whose untreated earache had become a raging, potentially fatal infection of the brain lining. From OR theatrics to thorny ethical questions, from the surprisingly primitive tools in a neurosurgeon’s kit to glimpses of future techniques like the “brain lift,” Firlik cracks open medicine’s most prestigious and secretive specialty. Candid, smart, clear-eyed, and unfailingly engaging, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe is a mesmerizing behind-the-scenes glimpse into a world of incredible competition and incalculable rewards.
Download or read book The Mind s Eye written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable 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 reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, 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. 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. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading? The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.
Download or read book Musicophilia written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-02-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music? What is it about music, what gives it such peculiar power over us, power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force? Music has no concepts, it lacks images; it has no power of representation, it has no relation to the world. And yet it is evident in all of us–we tap our feet, we keep time, hum, sing, conduct music, mirror the melodic contours and feelings of what we hear in our movements and expressions. In this book, Oliver Sacks explores the power music wields over us–a power that sometimes we control and at other times don’t. He explores, in his inimitable fashion, how it can provide access to otherwise unreachable emotional states, how it can revivify neurological avenues that have been frozen, evoke memories of earlier, lost events or states or bring those with neurological disorders back to a time when the world was much richer. This is a book that explores, like no other, the myriad dimensions of our experience of and with music.
Download or read book Everything in Its Place written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the legendary author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: a volume of essays on everything from primordial life and the mysteries of the brain to the ancient ginkgo and the power of the written word. "Magical . . . [Everything in Its Place] showcases the neurologist's infinitely curious mind."—People Magazine In this volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions that defined his life--both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. Everything in Its Place brings together writings on a rich variety of topics. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? In several of the compassionate case histories included here, we see Sacks consider the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia for the first time. In others, he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette's syndrome, aging, dementia, and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks's love of the natural world--and his final meditations on life in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Nocturnal Brain written by Dr. Guy Leschziner and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned neurologist shares the true stories of people unable to get a good night’s rest in The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep, a fascinating exploration of the symptoms and syndromes behind sleep disorders. For Dr. Guy Leschziner’s patients, there is no rest for the weary in mind and body. Insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, apnea, and sleepwalking are just a sampling of conditions afflicting sufferers who cannot sleep—and their experiences in trying are the stuff of nightmares. Demoniac hallucinations frighten people into paralysis. Restless legs rock both the sleepless and their sleeping partners with unpredictable and uncontrollable kicking. Out-of-sync circadian rhythms confuse the natural body clock’s days and nights. Then there are the extreme cases. A woman in a state of deep sleep who gets dressed, unlocks her car, and drives for several miles before returning to bed. The man who has spent decades cleaning out kitchens while “sleep-eating.” The teenager prone to the serious, yet unfortunately nicknamed Sleeping Beauty Syndrome stuck in a cycle of excessive unconsciousness, binge eating, and uncharacteristic displays of aggression and hypersexuality while awake. With compassionate stories of his patients and their conditions, Dr. Leschziner illustrates the neuroscience behind our sleeping minds, revealing the many biological and psychological factors necessary in getting the rest that will not only maintain our physical and mental health, but improve our cognitive abilities and overall happiness.
Download or read book Phantoms in the Brain written by V. S. Ramachandran and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1999-08-18 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity of his experiments -- using such low-tech tools as cotton swabs, glasses of water and dime-store mirrors. In Phantoms in the Brain, Dr. Ramachandran recounts how his work with patients who have bizarre neurological disorders has shed new light on the deep architecture of the brain, and what these findings tell us about who we are, how we construct our body image, why we laugh or become depressed, why we may believe in God, how we make decisions, deceive ourselves and dream, perhaps even why we're so clever at philosophy, music and art. Some of his most notable cases: A woman paralyzed on the left side of her body who believes she is lifting a tray of drinks with both hands offers a unique opportunity to test Freud's theory of denial. A man who insists he is talking with God challenges us to ask: Could we be "wired" for religious experience? A woman who hallucinates cartoon characters illustrates how, in a sense, we are all hallucinating, all the time. Dr. Ramachandran's inspired medical detective work pushes the boundaries of medicine's last great frontier -- the human mind -- yielding new and provocative insights into the "big questions" about consciousness and the self.
Download or read book The River of Consciousness written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the best-selling author of Gratitude, On the Move, and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. Oliver Sacks, a scientist and a storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars) in which he introduced and explored many now familiar disorders--autism, Tourette's syndrome, face blindness, savant syndrome. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, Gratitude). Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
Download or read book On the Move written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions—weight lifting and swimming—also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer—and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.
Download or read book Image and Reality written by Alan J. Rocke and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity. Arguing that visual mental images regularly assisted many of these scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated molecules were interconnected. These portrayals of “chemical structures,” both as mental images and as paper tools, gradually became an accepted part of science during these years and are now regarded as one of the central defining features of chemistry. In telling this fascinating story in a manner accessible to the lay reader, Rocke also suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative thinking in all fields. Image and Reality is the first book in the Synthesis series, a series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Angela N. H. Creager, John E. Lesch, Stuart W. Leslie, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan Rocke, E.C. Spary, and Audra J. Wolfe, in partnership with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Download or read book An Anthropologist on Mars written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-11-14 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat • Fascinating portraits of neurological disorder in which men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality. Here are seven detailed narratives of neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. Sacks combines the well honed mind of an academician with the verve of a true storyteller.
Download or read book Brainstorm written by Suzanne O'Sullivan and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading neurologist recounts some of her most astonishing, challenging cases, which demonstrate how central the study of epilepsy has been to our understanding of the brain. Brainstorm follows the stories of people whose medical diagnoses are so strange even their doctor struggles to know how to solve them. A man who sees cartoon characters running across the room; a girl whose world suddenly seems completely distorted, as though she were Alice in Wonderland; another who transforms into a ragdoll whenever she even thinks about moving. The brain is the most complex structure in the universe. Neurologists must puzzle out life-changing diagnoses from the tiniest of clues, the ultimate medical detective work. In this riveting book, Suzanne O’Sullivan takes you with her as she tracks the clues of her patients’ symptoms. It’s a journey that will open your eyes to the unfathomable intricacies of our brains and the infinite variety of human experience.
