I'm not a fan of his work but can you say you were “duped” if we don’t really know which parts of his writings were suspect and which parts were not? I wouldn’t think it unusual for popular, literary-style case studies to include some imaginative fabrications. I’m not aware of any sexual misconduct claims, apart from the ones circulated during his life which seem to have been, in Sacks’s own words, a retaliatory act. What are these others specifically?

Even during his life people often accused Sacks of grandstanding and emotionality. I recall the accusation: “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.”

The important thing is if his body of work went through the proper scientific channels. Is it objective? Consistently repeatable? Its often that people will take a 'paper' or even a 'person' and make treat them as if they are representatives of the truth. His methods, peer review, and whether those conclusions were appropriately challenged are all that matter. His private life or personality is irrelevant.

Most of his famous work were case studies, interpretative narratives which you can’t really peer review. They were stories about what he saw, and heard from relatives, not scientific facts based on experiments which can be replicated.

A recent New Yorker article exposed neurologist Oliver Sacks as a fabulist (and apparently a sexual abuser), putting into doubt his famous case studies. — NOS4A2

Not to dismiss the reality of humanity being allowed to procreate outside of the explicit permission and authority of a Lord or King. You are correct, as far as that implication outside of your ability to perceive you've made, yes. Laypeople are terrible without strict guidelines and harsh punishment, absolutely.

But all that aside, what does that have to do with anything as far as his studies? We delude ourselves to think a beautiful painting painted by a mass genocidal murderer is any less beautiful than the same painting painted by a saint. It's this very delusion that allows horrible people to not only guide but control the lives and futures of decent people forevermore. The solution is to finally embrace common sense and the individual self-worth people who proclaim what the OP proclaims only finds in the opinions of others. Basically, to stop being a follower and to finally grow up. We delude ourselves into thinking we're men or women by doing adult things, the more offensive and dangerous, the more "grown up" we are. Or so we think. But in reality all it does is result in the inner child that never grew up becoming more powerful, until it becomes our very identity forever cutting our self off from true adulthood, from what it means to truly be a free and mature human being.

↪Philosophim Most of his famous work were case studies, interpretative narratives which you can’t really peer review. They were stories about what he saw, and heard from relatives, not scientific facts based on experiments which can be replicated. — Tom Storm

Then it was always circumspect and no one should have listened to them.

Then it was always circumspect and no one should have listened to them. — Philosophim

Hindsight is 20/20. Literally the cheapest statement anyone could ever make. "Oh maybe that person who died because they forgot to put the parking brake on before crawling under the vehicle to do repair work should have." No kidding.

The fact is humanity since the very beginning and even now have no choice but to poke and prod into the unknown, into the darkness, to find a better path forward. There was no "evidence" that cooking meat on a fire would be healthy. There was no "evidence" that maybe some random plant or random chemical would heal the sick or save a life. But we chose to embrace possibility, to have "faith", if you will, that something unknown, some action currently considered useless, might one day in fact prove to become useful. Shame on you! And I thought you were one of the more open-minded posters here. :wink:

Then it was always circumspect and no one should have listened to them. — Philosophim

You've never heard of case studies? They are always open to question.

Hindsight is 20/20. Literally the cheapest statement anyone could ever make. — Outlander

To be clear, this is nothing wrong with taking and exploring something proposed or claimed. My point was that if it was never peer reviewed or tested with repeatable results, it never should have been taken as more than something to look into.

You've never heard of case studies? They are always open to question. — Tom Storm

See above.

Of course. That's a most reasonable reply. Only a fool would not see the value in it. However..

peer reviewed — Philosophim

Heliocentric theory was "peer reviewed". It's negative finding was not only disappointing for the purveyor but quite arresting, as it were, if you want to look up the story. Not to mention this guy.

This is your past, mind you. The only thing stopping you from repeating it is law enforcement, shall we say. And education I guess.

Point being, echo chambers no matter how well-worded and sophisticated, advanced (or "secular") if you think, remain what they are.

tested with repeatable results — Philosophim

Again, the same thing. Imagine a doctor's toolkit in ancient Mesopotamia. It was cutting edge for it's time. Literally thought of as a delivery kit from the Heaven's gifted by the gods. And it was, effectively, for it's time. For it did provide what was thought of as miracles. Today? If even a high school dropout saw a "doctor" coming at him with even the most advanced tool from said kit he'd run out and call the police and get the place shut down and his license revoked. Rightfully so!

So, it just goes to show. We know what we know, but knowledge without discipline to use it properly results in complacency, ignorance, robbing mankind from his true future. Don't you get it?

You've never heard of case studies? They are always open to question.
— Tom Storm

See above. — Philosophim

You said this:

Then it was always circumspect and no one should have listened to them. — Philosophim

Isn't that potentially a baby and bathwater situation? Maybe the point is not that no one should have listened or accepted them, but rather that they should always have been understood as approximations of human experience, like most case studies going back across the centuries.

It’s an obvious point that case studies, or narrative descriptions (like journalism), are not science. They are always crafted to dramatize a point and, as such, are inevitably open to allegations of bias, skewing, and stylised representation. But they can be valuable in giving people an impression or sense of an experience (outside of boring experiments and data points).

I guess the question for Sack's material is did he go too far and is there a line, given it's not a science?

Full disclosure: I too was duped by his writing, especially the apparent empathy he had towards his patients, who may or may not have existed in the first place. — NOS4A2

I don't feel duped at all. I do feel like The New Yorker article makes possible a deeper understanding of the way Sacks experienced and reported on the world -- which was perhaps unlike the way many of us do.

If we can't take Sacks word about his patients as fact, we probably can't take his word about himself as fact either. As one of his friends said [quoting from the article] “Come on, you’re extravagantly romanticizing how bad you are—just as much as you were extravagantly romanticizing what the patient said. Your mother’s accusing voice has taken over.” And you gotta wonder about a doctor who is so disturbed by a nighttime erection that he "cools his penis" in orange jello (from the article).

Being a homosexual physician in 1960 was certainly difficult -- being homosexual at all back then wasn't easy. Sacks mother managed wonderfully to screw up her son's sense of sexuality and selfhood. I can relate very personally to the act of maternal sexual shaming and condemnation. Such parental acts can really screw up gay sons's personalities.

I've read several of his books. One, about deaf people, "Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf," is a good example (as far as I can tell) of Sack's ability to deeply relate to others, and his observational skills. The group of deaf people that Sacks wrote about had sensory deprivation (deafness) but no other neurological problems. But sensory deprivation is a significant limitation to normal human experience.

How was Sacks a sexual abuser? Did I miss something in the article?

There is an important role in society for the "skilled detractor" who takes on the reputation of famous people. They do a good job of moderating tendencies toward hero-worship. A socialist I know who was a leader of local party activities, an insightful commentator, a hard working dedicated true-believer, was also a deadbeat father, never providing support for his daughter. I could write a book about him, depicting him as a personal fraud.

Such a book would be an unfair representation. It wasn't as if the guy lived a comfortable life with stable employment, a home, benefits like health insurance, and so on. His commitment to the cause pretty much demanded impoverishment, the same way a future saint committed to the poor demands impoverishment.

Some people might accuse this fellow of living in some sort of dream world; but he was a very hard-nosed realist.

There are any number of cherished figures who could be savaged by some skilled researching maybe axe-grinding de-constructor of reputations. Some of them deserve it. Some do not.

Any reaction this @Tom Storm

I think that's a really valid, fair and nicely worded perspective.

How was Sacks a sexual abuser? Did I miss something in the article? — BC

Powerless, mentally ill people who've failed at life gain purpose in this world by lying and ruining the lives of those more successful. And since they're powerless and mentally ill, that basically means anyone and everyone. See crab mentality ie. "if I can't have something, you can't have it either." Sometimes (often) it's just about the money (ie. "say he abused you, never change your story, someone else will too, and we'll legally rob him in court ironically using the justice system itself to facilitate our criminality and walk off wealthy in a few weeks flat, guaranteed!"). It's an interesting phenomena when someone you know (or perhaps have been intimate with) becomes a world-famous celebrity, even a small local celebrity, while you remain struggling, wealthy in nothing but a sea of regret in regards to your own poor life choices. The hate, the jealousy, the bitterness that was never resolved as a child surfaces and eats away at morally weak people until there's nothing left.

And of course, sometimes people are people and really did do the bad things they're accused of doing. Often due to the ego of being an "untouchable" "celebrity." It's one of the darkest most pained things I find about existing in this world. You never really know who to believe.

I’ve accessed the original article via Apple News, and it’s an excellent piece of longform journalism. Sacks comes across as a fascinating if tortured kind of character. I particularly liked this paragraph:

He rejected what he called “pallid, abstract knowing,” and pushed medicine to engage more deeply with patients’ interiority and how it interacted with their diseases. Medical schools began creating programs in medical humanities and “narrative medicine,” and a new belief took hold: that an ill person has lost narrative coherence, and that doctors, if they attend to their patients’ private struggles, could help them reconstruct a new story of their lives. At Harvard Medical School, for a time, students were assigned to write a “book” about a patient. Stories of illness written by physicians (and by patients) began proliferating, to the point that the medical sociologist Arthur Frank noted, “ ‘Oliver Sacks’ now designates not only a specific physician author but also a . . . genre—a distinctively recognizable form of storytelling.”

I’d never read a lot of Sacks, although I have read the actual anecdote about the man who mistook his wife for a hat. It seems clear he was a ‘fabulist’ but then he’s that kind of mind, an obsessive writer who in in younger days filled journals in a couple of days. I don’t think much the worse of him for the fact that some of what he wrote was embellishment or exaggeration.

A recent New Yorker article exposed neurologist Oliver Sacks as a fabulist (and apparently a sexual abuser), putting into doubt his famous case studies — NOS4A2

First of all, neither the recent New Yorker article nor any other reputable publication has accused Oliver Sacks of sexual abuse. There is no documented allegation, charge, or credible claim in the historical record that Sacks sexually abused patients or anyone else. So who is the fabulist here?

Secondly, Sacks’ most famous account was captured in the book , and later film, Awakenings. It was about a group of patients in a state of dormancy for years as a result of the Great flu epistemic. who were briefly ‘brought back to life’ with the use of L-dopa. There is hard medical documentation that something like Sacks’s awakenings happened. There are contemporaneous medical reports, Sacks’s own clinical papers and the later neurology literature documenting the trials and typical outcomes.The characters depicted in the book were fictionalized for dramatic effect, which Sacks readily acknowledged, but this doesn’t invalidate the claim of the book that a kind of small miracle took place.

As to the title of the OP, The Man Who Never Mistook his Wife for a Hat, there really was a patient who persistently misidentified his wife as a hat. The way Sack tells that story combines a mixture of clinical observation and literary shaping.

The patient was a music teacher suffering from a severe visual agnosia. Dr. P. could see clearly in a basic optical sense, but he could not integrate visual information into coherent wholes. Faces, objects, and scenes failed to appear to him as unified meaningful entities. He identified people by voice, clothing, or movement, and objects by isolated features rather than by form.

Within that clinical framework, the famous moment of reaching for his wife’s head as though it were a hat is not implausible, nor is it contradicted by what we know about visual agnosia. Patients with this condition can and do misidentify objects in striking, sometimes bizarre ways because the perceptual system that normally binds features into “things” is compromised. From a neurological standpoint, nothing in that incident requires fabrication to make sense.

What later critics and the recent New Yorker discussion complicate is not whether Dr. P. existed or whether he had profound perceptual deficits, but how literally we should read that scene as a verbatim, isolated, camera-ready moment. Whether that exact gesture occurred precisely as written, or whether it condensed multiple confusions into one memorable scene, is something Sacks himself would likely have regarded as beside the point.

The New Yorker piece never claims that everything Oliver Sacks wrote about his patients is false or purely fictional. What it does is discuss previously unpublished journal entries in which Sacks admits to altering or embellishing aspects of patient experiences in his writing to make their stories clearer or more dramatic in the service of empathy or narrative power. It frames his case studies as blending observation with his own emotional, autobiographical perspective, rather than being strictly objective clinical reports. This is something I always was aware of in reading his work, and for me it enhanced the power of his accounts compared with a dry and sterile clinical description.

Some advice: Don’t slip into the extreme tendency of worshipping your heroes as ethically pure and you won’t be catapulted into the opposite extreme of discarding everything they accomplished. It also helps not to make up slanderous accusations about their sexual behavior.

The notion that science is the only path to knowledge is, of course, silly. HIstory (including case histories) is never repeatable. Even scientific experiments are not repeatable -- all are unique events.

The history of psychology and psychoanalysis is replete with meaningful and insightful works that are not "scientific". Freud revolutionized how we see ourselves and our subconsciouses, but his psychoanalyses have not been found effective in treating psychological disorders. Does that mean they are worthless? Freud was, if no more, a literary genius. "Totem and Taboo" is not, perhaps, an accurate history of totemism. Instead, it is a myth -- deeper and more meaningful than history. Sacks books may not have been quite at that level, but they are both insightful and brilliant -- whether or not they contain a few "stretchers".

"Show me a man who does not lie, and I'll show you a man who hasn't much to say," wrote Mark Twain. Sacks certainly had a lot to say, some of it controversial.

How was Sacks a sexual abuser? Did I miss something in the article?

I feel terrible. I confused Sacks with one of his characters, Leonard, who was the abuser in question. I think the author of the article was implying he came up with this story using his own experiences. I admit my guilt and take full responsibility for that dangerous and false accusation.

Thanks for the correction. To error is human, claiming the error as your own is divine. Sort of divine, anyway. The gods usually don't admit to error.

Here's another tidbit about Oliver Sacks: He was "face-blind". I can relate to the -- I'm not face blind, but I certainly have difficulty recognizing faces, sometimes. There is a back office in the brain that specializes in facial recognition, and if it's not working well, people's faces don't register in memory. That's a problem for social animals.

I just read a book about a man whose father had sexual contacts with him as a child (and did the same to numerous other children). The author's personality was quite screwed up, but did an exceptionally poor job of explicating a connection between what seemed like very limited sexual contact and a life of mental suffering. Father and son were both screwed up, but were otherwise successful men. Was the man (the subject of the book) screwed up because of the sexual contact, or screwed up for other reasons? Can't tell. I wish he had done a better job of explaining.

POINT IS: illustrating psychological or neurological disturbances effectively is apparently difficult to get right. Sacks was able to vividly [from Latin Vivere - to live] depict his patients internal reality. I'm grateful for that.

Well, thanks for the thread. It's been interesting reading.

You missed NOS4A2's retraction.

You missed NOS4A2's retraction. — BC

An easy mistake. I know wealthy people (who've earned every cent they have) who become falsely targeted by benighted, wicked people—people who know deep down the world would be better off without them—often. It's a personal trigger for me, is all. Ask anyone here familiar in law, sometimes obviously false predatory accusations make it farther than they should.

But anyway now that that's cleared up, back to the topic:

So I’m wondering, will the doubt of his body of work affect anyone’s stances? Should one remove any influence Sacks may have had on one’s thinking? — NOS4A2

What philosophical "discoveries" or "conundrums" or even "exercises" really depend on the factual nature of something occurring in the real world vs. occurring in a hypothetical (world) situation, though? :chin:

Obviously strictly scientific or medical information that did not factually occur is one thing.

But take the Trolley Problem, for example. It's led to pages, perhaps even entire libraries (though that may be a slight exaggeration) of good, honest work based on a wholly fictitious scenario. It doesn't "matter" that there never was an actual trolley problem, only that there could be, thus making it valid for philosophical exploration, no?

thanks for that clear-sighted analysis :clap:

The notion that science is the only path to knowledge is, of course, silly. HIstory (including case histories) is never repeatable. Even scientific experiments are not repeatable -- all are unique events.

The history of psychology and psychoanalysis is replete with meaningful and insightful works that are not "scientific". Freud revolutionized how we see ourselves and our subconsciouses, but his psychoanalyses have not been found effective in treating psychological disorders. Does that mean they are worthless? Freud was, if no more, a literary genius. "Totem and Taboo" is not, perhaps, an accurate history of totemism. Instead, it is a myth -- deeper and more meaningful than history. Sacks books may not have been quite at that level, but they are both insightful and brilliant -- whether or not they contain a few "stretchers".

"Show me a man who does not lie, and I'll show you a man who hasn't much to say," wrote Mark Twain. Sacks certainly had a lot to say, some of it controversial. — Ecurb

:up: Well said, and welcome to the forum.

On the other hand, I never managed to find the insightful and brilliant in his books, because the first one I read was so dull it put me off reading any others: Musicophilia. My loss, I suppose.

On the other hand, I never managed to find the insightful and brilliant in his books, because the first one I read was so dull it put me off reading any others: Musicophilia. My loss, I suppose. — Jamal

2007. What was that like 5 years ago? Come on man. Imagine if we judged every artist by his or her first work. Imagine the kind of world we would be living in. :chin:

On the other hand, I never managed to find the insightful and brilliant in his books, because the first one I read was so dull it put me off reading any others: Musicophilia. My loss, I suppose. — Jamal

I've only ever read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife...".
At the time, I found it interesting, but didn't know what to make of it. Now, I think that there was an important contribution in that he took the mistake out of the joke-book and into a real life. Neither laughter nor condescending pity were enough any more. He belongs with R.G. Laing and the others in his insistence that mental patients do have something to say about their condition that is not merely meaningless noise.

The history of psychology and psychoanalysis is replete with meaningful and insightful works that are not "scientific". Freud revolutionized how we see ourselves and our subconsciouses, but his psychoanalyses have not been found effective in treating psychological disorders. Does that mean they are worthless? — Ecurb

It all depends, doesn't it, on what you think is worthy? "Unscientific" understanding of people involves models that do not align with standard ideas of scientific understanding. Even if there were pills to sort out every mental illness, it would still be necessary to understand the "patient" and their life beyond the clinic. There's no single answer to that, so we need to take on board alternative approaches.

2007. What was that like 5 years ago? Come on man. Imagine if we judged every artist by his or her first work. Imagine the kind of world we would be living in. :chin: — Outlander

Well, yes. But he wrestled with what he was trying to do throughout his career. Everything is a way-marker. No actual conclusions - here is the Sacks method.

2007. What was that like 5 years ago? Come on man. Imagine if we judged every artist by his or her first work. Imagine the kind of world we would be living in. — Outlander

I didn't judge him or his work on the basis of the one book of his I read. I explicitly did the opposite. Also, you appear not to know what you're talking about, since the one I read was one of his later works. I get the feeling that you join these conversations not because you find them interesting or have anything to say, but because you have nothing else to do.

Do not say "come on man" ever again to me, please.

I didn't judge his his work on the basis of the one book of his I read. I explicitly did the opposite. — Jamal

I believe you. My mistake. Of course, such is a reasonable one. Considering that's what any average person would be able to gather from the simultaneously limited yet explicit nature of the remarks you've made.

the one I read was one of his later works — Jamal

You are not wrong. "Musicophilia" is nearly 35 years senior from one early work of his, as a matter of fact! "Awakenings" being a much earlier book published in 1973! My mentors remain correct: vigorous assumptions tend to make enemies out of would-be friends.

Of course, per your own testimony, "Musicophilia" was his "first work" as far as you've become acquainted with. That is your "first impression" and (presuming your mind is average) overall judgement of the man and his potential works. And there are in fact other works that perhaps might be a bit more satisfying or fulfilling to such a refined (and, in my eyes, demanding) sense you seem to have. I was merely suggesting that perhaps the man may have produced something more suited to your liking in the time since 2007. Perhaps this is not true. This is merely the nature of an implied suggestion. That perhaps, maybe his next book may possibly be better than the first you've read or or is otherwise something you may be more receptive to.

I get the feeling that you join these conversations not because you find them interesting or have anything to say, but because you have nothing else to do. — Jamal

Perish the thought. I can assure you the exact opposite is true. Yea, perhaps at this particular moment, while I await the result of a much more personally-concerning matter, I tend to be more, shall we say, fluid and open with communication. Both personal and private (or whatever we consider the "Internet" as). I don't wish to declare but can reasonably understand this utterance as a possible lighthearted suggestion to reconsider my postings towards others here so that each be something more refined and purpose-driven in the intent of philosophical engagement and not personal whim or social communication. Yes, thank you. Iron truly sharpens iron. I will ensure future engagement reflects this kind encouragement given.

Do not say "come on man" ever again to me, please. — Jamal

As you decree. Surely you know, this is a region-specific phrase that means "Wait a minute, think about that at least once more before being so sure." Or similar.

:up: Well said, and welcome to the forum.

On the other hand, I never managed to find the insightful and brilliant in his books, because the first one I read was so dull it put me off reading any others: Musicophilia. My loss, I suppose. — Jamal

In An Anthropoogist on Mars Sacks has a chapter about blind people who recover their vision. They can suddenly see, but cannot interpret what they see. Depth perception (which most of us learn while batting mobiles around in our cribs) is difficult. It takes a year or more for them to navigate the world as a seeing person.

Then Sacks mentions the story of Jesus restoring the sight to a blind man, from Mark 8.

“And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.

After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly..”

The Mark version is remarkable in its agreement with the Sacks stories about those whose sight has been restored by modern medical techniques. The formerly blind man could not differentiate between men and trees. In terms of literary skill, Sacks' ability to reference Biblical literature adds to the resonance of the story. Does any of this add credence to the Gospel tale? Well, maybe not. But it demonstrates Sacks' breath of knowledge, which typifies his writing. It's bits like this that I admire in Sacks.

Sacks inspires me still, and I loved "The Man Who...".

When I read it for an intro psych course in the 90s, I thought it was 'objective' and recall it being presented as such. I would never conclude that had I just read it now.

My point was that if it was never peer reviewed or tested with repeatable results, it never should have been taken as more than something to look into. — Philosophim

Sure, but this discounts the entire discipline of psychology, with its 'repeatability crisis' only emerging into public discourse recently despite decades of tenuous claims. As a discipline, it is less than 200 years old. It remains, in most cases, a social science, not a hard science.

I don't reject your premise - I think it can be applied more broadly.

The peer review process is, currently, a farce.

There is hard medical documentation that something like Sacks’s awakenings happened. — Joshs

There is. And yet, 'catatonic schizophrenia' is no longer considered 'real'.

Not to detract from your point - just to reassert, this is a social science, that at times crosses into medical science - just, with thousands fewer years of history behind it.