Cognitive Psychology

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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

And Other Clinical Tales

By Oliver Sacks

In this collection of twenty-four clinical narratives, neurologist Oliver Sacks examines people whose injuries, illnesses, and atypical neurological conditions have profoundly altered perception, memory, bodily awareness, language, impulse, or identity. The title case concerns Dr. P., a musician who can describe individual visual features yet cannot reliably recognize the objects and people before him. Other chapters consider severe amnesia, Tourette syndrome, loss of proprioception, phantom limbs, involuntary reminiscence, unusual artistic abilities, and distinctive forms of calculation and attention. Sacks is interested not only in locating an impairment but also in understanding the life constructed around it. Music, routine, imagination, faith, art, and personal relationships may become essential means of orientation. The result is an influential example of literary medical writing that presents neurology as a study of whole lives, while also raising enduring questions about patie…