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Rating: What fascinates and attracts us is not always clear even to ourselves. Trying to share certain passions might reserve us surprises that are not always pleasant. Listening to our reasons does not always give us the certainty of being right.
These statements, seemingly nonsensical, are the perfect prologue to what will be the exposition of the sensations that Oliver Sacks' book awakened in me: it is rare to feel such a strong participation and involvement of the author in the stories told, especially since the stories are true and the protagonists are the people of the forgotten and marginalized, known as mentally retarded or simple, as Sacks defines them in the fourth part of his book.
The author is a neurologist who became a writer because he was driven by the need to share experiences and discoveries with colleagues of equal fame but above all eager to inform about conditions as strange, difficult, and rare as they are often labeled incurable or worse, as something to cure in the attempt to bring back to normality (?) the affected individuals.
The need to provide an expository order forced Sacks to divide the book into four parts, within which various clinical cases are reported, all referring to the neurological condition triggering the sometimes funny and strange, sometimes sad and painful aspects that unite the protagonists. In the writings, an attempt is made to explain in layman’s terms the peculiar aspects of the disorder, which are in fact identified based on these: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. I will briefly touch upon some stories characterizing the individual topics.
Losses: these are the functional deficits, generated at least in the reported cases, in the right hemisphere of the brain, the so-called "minor"; in this part, the case of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" is described, the title of the essay and a story that is not at all sad, considering the unawareness and gaffes of Dr. P., who could no longer assign meaning to what he saw, so much that he mistook his wife's head for his hat!
Here we also talk about the phantom limb syndrome: how many of us know that this syndrome, although sometimes painful, is fundamental when it comes to the use of a prosthesis? We are thus explained how the presence of the "phantom" is useful for the integration and optimization of the use of the prosthesis: this is how a "negative" fact instead assumes an unexpected positivity, as well as the necessity of its presence.
Excesses: here Sacks deals with the exaggerations caused by the deficits, typical of the parkinsonian attitude: a case that we surely all remember is reported, for the unforgettable performance of De Niro and Williams in the 1990 film with the same name "Awakenings." In this episode, the use of a drug led to the improbable cure of some patients, who indeed slowly returned to the catatonic state they had been in for many years, carrying with them the sense of failure of the doctor (Sacks himself) who had truly believed in the effects of L-dopa.
In the same way, he explains how for Ray, a great jazz drummer without therapy, the tics of Tourette's syndrome are preferable, while he plays, to the calm and tranquility "provided" by the medication: the remedy, in short, is sometimes worse than the problem!
Transports: in this part of the essay, the least immediate in the perception of the problems narrated, the author deals with the power of the mind and its ability to "transport" people to events and places forgotten in memory for some time or perhaps never "surfaced" at the conscious level. He explains to us how two identical situations in the present can actually be experienced in a diametrically opposite manner because they developed in the past under different emotional conditions.
The stories hinted at so far are just a small part of those found in the book's pages, yet it should already be noted that the effect they produce in the reader is not of boring and academic reading, they do not contain a mere exposition of symptoms, signs, exams, diagnoses, they do not teach through a cold scientific presentation of facts, on the contrary, they involve us in stories that feel fantastic, poetic, tender, painful, that go straight to your heart and, why not, to your brain, where they will leave a mark: Sacks knows he is using a sympathetic and indelible ink, that of emotions and feelings.
As usual, the closing requires double attention and here, perhaps like in the book, there is a moment of uncertainty, as if this topic could be considered superfluous: The World of the Simple, the fourth and last part, I believe was deliberately left at the end because it deals with patients who, having no certain neurological allocation, belong to the great mass of mentally retarded also known as simple.
The author confides in Dr. Luria, a famous Russian neurologist and his friend, that he finds it difficult to deal with such patients because he finds it depressing the inability to "connect", but he will change his mind when he experiences their... emotional and personal potential, whatever their (intellectual) shortcomings... and he will realize that studying their deficits instead of their qualities leads us to make serious interpretative errors.
The story of Rebecca is practically that of the ugly duckling, who suddenly becomes a swan when immersed in a world made of music, theater, and nature. So it will be for José, the autistic artist, who knew how to give life and movement to the photos he redrew with his pen.
In conclusion, I can only close with the author’s words:... "I did not see her in the context of a test, of a clinic. This was my human vision, quite different from the neurological one."
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