The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks

Some book titles just beg you to read them, even if you have no idea what they're about. This was one of those books for me - but it turned out to be about a very timely topic for me. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is filled with clinical tales about patients with neurological and neuropsychological impairments. Sacks presents his case studies, along with varying degrees of information about what was "wrong" with these individuals. Often times, however, it appears that there are no solutions to the maladies, and Sacks's patients are left to try and cope in their turned upside-down world. As I was reading this book, I found myself wishing that I had more of a basic background on the biology of the brain and what functions different parts of the brain are responsible for. While Sacks will explain that his patient suffers from frontal lobe damage, he does not explain why or how this would lead to the symptoms he has observed. The back of the book also describe Sacks as telling these stories with compasion and an understanding of the suffering of his patients, but I didn't really find this to be true. His approach to his patients often seemed overly blunt, or almost mocking (sometimes he acknowledges this) - and while it is obvious from the descriptions of his patients how horrible many of their symptoms are, I didn't feel as if there was a placing of the patients into the larger context of their lives. Sacks might comment that a given individual had learned to deal with the condition, or become depressed because of it, or simply remained in the constant care of a hospital, but I often found myself wanting to know more. Without this additional information, I began to feel as if the book were no more than a salacious detailing of freaks in our society -and I do not think this is the result anyone, including Sacks, wanted his reader to have. Luckily for me, the day after I finished reading this book, I had an all day training at work - by a psychiatrist who gave a lecture on the basic biology of the brain, neurological disorders, and testing that can be done to determine whether neurological damage exists. After the lecture, I went back and re-read a couple chapters of the book - and having a better background did help. This book is an interesting introduction into neuropsychology, the complexity of the brain, and how many strange things can happen for inexplicable reasons. Given how complex and delicate the brain is, it certainly made me wonder why more of us don't have neurological problems. Or, maybe we all do, and we've just found good ways to mask them.