Framing the Dialogue

If ever there was an intriguing title The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat has to be in the top ten.  Author Dr. Oliver Sacks provides numerous tales of unusual behaviors caused by neurological disorders.  Yes there was a man who mistook his wife for a hat though the title is more provocative than the actual tale.  I found the tales interesting, but the book was written for someone with a much higher interest level than I have.  To that end Dr. Sacks provides deeper discussions of the physiology behind the stories.  Most of this was way over my head so I enjoyed the first half of each story. 

Fortunately many of the clinical tales recount rather rare conditions.  In one case that stuck with me was where a man totally lost his sight, but did not know it;

“not only was he centrally or ‘cortically’ blind, but he had lost all visual images and memories, lost them totally – yet had no sense of any loss.  Indeed he had lost the very idea of seeing – and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as ‘seeing’ and light.”