Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who brought us Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells David Cohen about his “lost years” in California, his subsequent life as an alien and how cancer gave him the opportunity to experiment on himself for his latest book
FOR his 76th birthday, received an ounce of osmium, the densest natural element in the periodic table. “I like density, and it’s the only really blue metal, it’s rather beautiful,” he says. The year before he got a “nice rod of rhenium” and the year before that it was a piece of tungsten.
You may have worked out that the gifts were chosen because the place they occupy in the periodic table corresponded to his age. Sacks’s office in downtown Manhattan, New York, is littered with samples of elements. “I like to have some of my metals around me all the time,” he says. It is an impressive collection, though perhaps a little unexpected for a man who is famous for his amazing collection of case histories in neurology.
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Sacks, a physician-turned-author, shot to fame in 1973 with the publication of Awakenings, a book that describes how he treated a group of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, otherwise known as sleepy sickness. The story was later turned into a film starring Robin Williams. His next famous book, , created a template for his non-fiction books about neurology: collections of case histories that Sacks picked for the intriguing ways in which his patients cope with baffling neurological disorders, together with his own scientific, poetic and philosophical reflections.
In person Sacks is gentle and polite, with the air of a doting uncle, though a series of knee and back operations have left him with aches and pains. “I can’t sit still for more than 20 minutes,” he says. This comes on top of a more dramatic health issue: in 2005 Sacks was diagnosed with a melanoma in his right eye.
Later this month, Sacks’s latest book will be published. explores a series of neurological disorders affecting vision. Unlike many of his other books, he devotes a chapter to his own experience of partially losing his sight. He describes how he experienced curious and unexpected optical illusions as his brain struggled to fill in the blanks.
Ever the scientist, Sacks experimented with his newly developed blind zone. In one experiment he looked at his foot, visually amputating it. Within moments a surreal foot-like blob began to form in its place. On another occasion, after an operation to remove the tumour left one eye completely bandaged, he closed his good eye, only to see the scene before him persist, as if he hadn’t closed his eyes at all. Sacks stops short of drawing sweeping conclusions about the nature of the brain and visual system, preferring his case histories to speak for themselves. But he says his general conclusion is that the brain has a remarkable ability to compensate if a sensory input is taken away. “It’s always busy,” he says.
Sacks was born in London in 1933. He studied medicine at the University of Oxford but felt after qualifying that there were “too many Dr Sacks” in the UK at the time – both his parents were physicians, as was his older brother. He decided to head west, and after a brief dalliance with the Royal Canadian Air Force – “I wanted to fly, they wanted me to do physiology” – Sacks headed south to California where he met the poet Thom Gunn, who would become a friend and writing mentor.
Though that period seems crucial in the development of Sacks’s interest in neurology and in cultivating his nascent writing skills, exactly what happened while he was in California is still shrouded in mystery. When I ask him about it, he looks wistful and says: “Those were my lost years, maybe one day I’ll write about them in greater detail.”
He moved to New York in 1965. “My ostensible reasons for coming to New York were academic,” says Sacks. He became fascinated by the techniques being pioneered by Robert Terry, then at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to study Alzheimer’s disease. However, he later admits there was another reason he left California. “I was a dangerous drug addict,” he says. “It started almost by accident. I would occasionally smoke cannabis, which everyone does. Someone had given me some cannabis laced with something. I found that lacing agent gorgeous.” Sacks became addicted to amphetamines. He says he was doing it as “a recourse for a lonely and isolated person”. He never took drugs with friends, always alone. “I would take a huge dose of amphetamine – 400 tablets on the weekend – and basically have something like a non-stop orgasm for 48 hours.”
“Did you fall in love, was it psychoanalysis? Or did it just happen?”
After three years of drug-taking, on New Year’s Day 1965 he found himself staring at his gaunt form in the bathroom mirror and decided he needed help. He moved to New York and began seeing a therapist who he continues to visit regularly. In 1966 Sacks began working with the patients that would feature in his book Awakenings, and the rest is slightly better documented history.
After Awakeningswas published, Gunn wrote to him in admiration. Sacks fishes out a letter from his files and reads me an extract: “The very things which had been most missing earlier of feeling for other people, now seem to be the centre and organising principle with the whole book.” Gunn asked him what happened. “Did you fall in love, was it psychoanalysis? Have you been taking drugs? Or did it just happen?” Sacks replied: “All four.”
Sacks is guarded on personal matters. He never married, nor does he have any children. Though he has “20 or so godchildren”, he says, “sometimes I do regret not having any, but in a way my books are my children.”
Kicking his addiction to drugs may have saved his life, but unlike many English people in New York who “go native”, Sacks has maintained a certain distance from his adopted home. “I have never voted in a US election, despite being a resident in the country for the last 50 years. I’m called a resident alien, and this suits me,” he says. Does he feel regret at being an outsider? “I think there are good and bad aspects to being an outsider. The good thing is that I can look with detachment and sympathy, the bad thing is that there’s not a sense of belonging or identification.”
This detachment has arguably been key to his success. But while the books have won huge praise and popularity, some critics think his style exploits the misfortune of his patients. Sacks says he takes the utmost care not to take advantage of anyone, though admits that after all these years he still has a residual feeling of discomfort when writing about his patients. “I had to fight against the notion that I was betraying people. Now I feel that if I write in a mode of respect and appreciation, and if I’m persuaded that it is OK with the person, then it is OK.”
Despite his age and ailing health, Sacks shows no sign of giving up his passions. Having largely recovered from his operations, he is back seeing patients. His next book, a follow up to The Mind’s Eye, exploring non-psychotic hallucinations brought about by conditions such as blindness, migraine and drug use, is in the pipeline.
Despite being brought up in a house where fervent Zionist meetings took place – his cousin Abba Eban later became the first Israeli ambassador to the United Nations – Sacks has largely shunned making his political views known. In his autobiography, he says he came to “hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort” – a feeling that has stayed with him to this day. He declined a recent invitation to join a group of “evangelist atheists” including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and says “I don’t want to take a public stance on the matter – why should I?”
Sacks prefers the subtle approach. “If I can go on describing things quietly and often at some personal reference, then in my own quiet way I will affect people one way or another.” And that, at heart, seems to sum Sacks up.
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Born in London in 1933, Oliver Sacks read medicine at the University of Oxford. He moved to the US, worked as a neurologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is now professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, both in New York City. His new book is
