Dr. Oliver Sacks
The author and first-person narrator of the book. Sacks’ stories are real accounts of interactions with his patients. Some names and details are altered in order to preserve the anonymity of his subjects. He is overall an incredibly kind, patient and generous individual, who writes about his often elderly, impaired subjects with the utmost respect, compassion, and a genuine admiration for their accomplishments.
A.R. Luria
Alexander Luria was a Russian neuroscientist whose research greatly influenced the field. Sacks cites Luria frequently, declaring him to be “[t]he greatest neurological treasure of our time” (235). Most of Luria’s patients suffered from fatal cerebral tumors which caused short-term memory loss. Although Luria was near the end of his life at the time of Sacks’ writing, Sacks writes to Luria about Jimmie G., one of Sacks’ patients. They also correspond about the upsurge of visibility of Tourette’s syndrome in the early 1970s, of which Luria writes: “Any understanding of such a syndrome must vastly broaden our understanding of human nature in general… I know of no other syndrome of comparable interest” (97).
Zazetsky
The wounded Russian soldier who was the subject of A.R. Luria’s seminal book, The Man with a Shattered World. Having survived a gunshot through only the left side of his brain, Zazetsky’s mental impairments informed a lot about left-hemisphere functions.
Dr. P
Dr. P is the subject of Sacks’ titular story, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” A “musician of distinction” who now teaches at the local School of Music (8), Dr. P gradually loses his capacity to recognize and distinguish faces. Although he can easily judge and identify abstract shapes and even cartoon drawings of faces, and he quickly beats Sacks in a game of mental chess, he doesn’t realize that he is holding a rose until he smells it, and he thinks that his foot is his shoe. After Sacks finishes a round of tests on him, Dr. P stands and reaches for his wife’s head, which he had mistaken for being a hat. Despite his confusion, he hums and sings as he moves about his home. He continues to teach and play music until the very end of his life.
Mrs. P
The wife of Dr. P, who is mistaken for being a hat.
Paul
Dr. P’s brother, one of the few people Dr. P is able to point out in a photograph, due to his “square jaw” and “big teeth.”
Jimmie G.
The subject of “The Lost Mariner,” Jimmie G. is forty-nine years old -- a healthy and handsome sailor who lives in a nursing home near New York City. Although he is charming and intelligent, he has no functioning short-term memory and perpetually believes the year to be 1945 (Sacks meets Jimmie G. in early 1975).
Jimmie G’s brother
Jimmie G. mentions his brother often, saying that he is engaged to a girl from Oregon. When his brother travels from Oregon to visit, Sacks describes their encounters as deeply emotional and moving to observe. However, Jimmie can’t understand why his brother looks so old, and talking to his brother does nothing to help Jimmie unlock his past.
Stephen R.
Sacks briefly describes the case of Stephen R., who like Jimmie G. has Korsakoff syndrome. However, Stephen only has two years of retrograde amnesia, meaning that when Stephen visits his old home, he feels totally comfortable and at ease, recognizing everything in his relatively unchanged house.
Christina
Christina is a twenty-seven-year-old woman with two children, who in her previous life worked from home as a computer programmer. Sacks writes that she is “intelligent and cultivated, fond of the ballet, and of the Lakeland poets” (44). Just before going into surgery to have her gallbladder removed, Christina suddenly finds it impossible to feel the ground beneath her. Soon she comes to feel entirely disembodied; a spinal tap reveals that she has a rare form of acute polyneuritis which has affected the sensory roots of her spinal and cranial nerves. Over eight years, she gradually replaces her proprioception by looking at each part of her body as it moves and listening to her voice as she talks. Sacks describes this process as slow and mentally arduous at first, but eventually, this visual monitoring became second-nature. Once a “ragdoll” (49) who was unable to move or sit up, Christina regains most of her motor skills and is able to function regularly as long as her attention isn’t diverted.
Mr. MacGregor
A good-humored elderly man who sees Dr. Sacks because, as Mr. MacGregor says, “others keep telling me I lean to the side” (71). Although Mr. MacGregor is convinced that his posture is normal, indeed when he walks, his body tilts at a twenty-degree angle. Sacks explains that he has lost part of his proprioception, the automatic and unconscious “sixth sense” that keeps the body balanced and upright. Mr. MacGregor, a former carpenter, rationalizes this diagnosis by way of making an analogy to a faulty spirit level -- the device used to measure the levelness of a surface. Inspired, Mr. MacGregor goes on to rig up a pair of glasses with a horizontal spirit level set about five inches out from the bridge of his nose. This way, he can use the leveler to monitor his balance visually instead of proprioceptively. Though it is initially exhausting to use, Sacks reports that after a couple of weeks, Mr. MacGregor is able to keep an eye on it unconsciously, like “keeping an eye on the instrument panel of one’s car while being free to think, chat, and do other things” (76).
The man who fell out of bed
Sacks encounters this unnamed man years ago, while Sacks was a medical student. The man is found on the floor of his hospital room, staring at his leg in anger and bewilderment. He tells Sacks that he had woke from a nap and, to his surprise and horror, found “someone’s leg” with him in his bed (55). After Sacks asks the man where his left leg is, if this leg isn’t it, the man shakes his head and says “I have no idea. It’s disappeared. It’s gone. It’s nowhere to be found” (57).
A puzzling patient of Dr. Michael Kremer
Described by Dr. Kremer in a letter to Sacks, this patient reported to have woken up and found a “dead, cold, hairy leg in bed… which he could not understand but could not tolerate” (57). The leg, of course, was his own.
Madeleine J.
Sixty years old, Madeleine J. is a congenitally blind woman with cerebral palsy “who had been looked after by her family at home throughout her life” (59). Despite being an exceptionally intelligent and well-read woman, Madeleine tells Sacks that she never learned to read braille; everything had always been read to her. She says that she can’t do anything with her hands at all -- “[u]seless godforsaken lumps of dough -- they don’t even feel part of me” (59). Sacks wonders if she doesn’t feel any connection with her hands simply because, over sixty years, she has never had the need to use them. Sacks describes witnessing her first ever “manual act” (62) as she takes hold of and eats a bagel without assistance from her nurses. With a new “hunger” for tactile sensation, she rapidly begins to explore objects in her environment, including Sacks’ face. Within a year she takes to sculpting, creating “simple but recognizable” figures with a “remarkably expressive energy” (63). Sacks praises her for her astonishing and unexpected artistic sensibility.
Simon K.
Much like Madeleine J., Simon K. has developmental agnosia in his hands due to having cerebral palsy and significantly impaired vision. Although, as Sacks describes, he is not “a natural artist like Madeleine,” (64) Simon becomes an adept carpenter after a year of gradually learning how to use his hands.
A sailor who accidentally cut off his right index finger
Described in “Phantoms,” this unnamed man is plagued for forty years by the sense that his amputated index finger is rigidly extended at all times. After developing severe sensory diabetic neuropathy, the sailor loses all feeling in his hands and in turn the phantom finger disappears.
A patient with a sleeping phantom leg
Sacks briefly describes a patient under his care who has to slap his thigh-stump every morning several times in order to “wake up” the phantom leg. Without his phantom, the man is unable to use his prosthetic leg to walk.
Charles D.
A patient who has to look at the position of his feet on the floor in order to remain balanced. Due to an issue in his dorsal root, Charles D. experiences rapidly fluctuating proprioceptive illusions that make the floor pitch, jerk and tilt “like a ship in heavy seas” (68).
A clear-headed man with an above-the-knee amputation
A man who tells Sacks that on occasion his phantom-foot “hurts like hell -- and the toes curl up, or go into spasm” (69). These pains only occur when the man has taken his prosthetic leg off for the night.
A woman with persistent phantom leg pain
Described by a former student of Sacks, this woman sought treatment for unabating pain in her phantom leg. Curiously, electrical stimulation of her spinal roots caused sharp, tingling pains in the phantom, but the same stimulation higher up in the spinal cord reduced the pain.
Mrs. S
Mrs. S. is a humorous and intelligent woman in her sixties who, after suffering a stroke that affected the deeper portions of her right cerebral hemisphere, completely loses touch with the left field of her vision. She is not simply blind in her left eye; rather, she cannot conceptualize the notion of a “leftward” reality. When brought a tray of food, for example, Mrs. S. complains that there is no food on the left half of the tray, and doesn’t comprehend or respond when told to turn her head to the left to see the rest of her meal. When she puts on makeup, she only applies it to the right side of her face -- incapable of drawing her attention to the other half. Eventually, Mrs. S. finds a solution to this problem: instead of turning to the left, she swivels around to the right in a circle until what she’s looking for comes into view. To address the makeup issue, Sacks arranges for a camera and video monitor to be assembled so that Mrs. S. can see the left half of her face in her right field of vision. This proves to be terribly confusing and distressing, and Mrs. S. demands the monitor be taken away.
The President
Sacks alludes to “The President” in a brief story of the same name, calling him “the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal” (80). Though the identity of “The President” is not made clear, Sacks’ description is most evocative of President Ronald Reagan, whose term in office was concurrent with the writing of this chapter (Sacks states in the preface that all previously unpublished stories in the book, including “The President,” were written during the autumn and winter of 1984).
The aphasia ward patients
These patients have suffered from “the severest receptive or global aphasia,” (80) meaning that they have lost the ability to understand the meaning of words. Although this condition sounds quite crippling, these patients still receive and understand all of the minute visual and tonal cues of speech, and thus they are usually able to understand the majority of what is said to them. Due to this unique impairment, “one cannot lie to an aphasiac,” Sacks writes. “He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them” (82). This is why, as Sacks describes, the entire ward was found laughing at a televised speech from the president, unaware of what the content of the speech but endlessly amused by the president’s “false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of his voice” (82).
Emily D.
Emily D. is also present in the aphasia ward during the president’s televised speech. However, she has a glioma in her right temporal lobe, which has diminished her ability to interpret tonal cues in speech (this is called tonal agnosia). Due to a malignant glaucoma, she has also rapidly lost her sight. A former English teacher, Emily D. demands that others speak to her in proper prose so that she can ascertain their express meaning. “Evocative” speech, which relies heavily on tone and cadence to express meaning, had become utterly incomprehensible to her.
Ray
“Witty Ticcy Ray” is twenty-four when he meets Dr. Sacks, “almost incapacitated by multiple tics of extreme violence coming in volleys every few seconds” (97). Though he had been subject to these attacks since the age of four, Ray had managed to get by with his wit, intelligence, and character. He successfully completed college, made close friends, and even got married. His condition had, in fact, helped him become an excellent ping-pong player and a virtuosic jazz drummer. Sacks prescribes to him a drug called Haldol, which proves within a matter of hours to be almost entirely effective. However, the drug slows his reflexes, resulting in an incident with a revolving door. He eventually adjusts to the drug, and after nine years of being tic-free, he returns to Sacks’ office. He says that he’s tired of being “sober,” and that without his Tourette’s he is, for the most part, a dull and unremarkable person who no longer experiences wild, creative surges. He loses his interest in drumming and ping-pong and reports feeling far less competitive or playful. Finally, he decides to compromise: on weekdays he will dutifully take his Haldol, and on the weekends he will “let fly.” “[H]e has been taught by his sickness,” Sacks writes, “and, in a way, he has transcended it” (101).
Natasha K.
Natasha K. is a ninety-year-old patient who comes into the clinic worried that she feels “too well.” A historically shy woman, Natasha reports that soon after her eighty-eighth birthday, she suddenly “felt young once again. I took an interest in the young men. I started to feel, you might say, ‘frisky’” (102). Her friends expressed surprise and concern at how she giggled and flirted with men much younger than her. Sacks is confused as to why this is of concern—until Natasha explains that nearly seventy years ago, she had contracted syphilis while working for a brothel. Although the syphilis had long vanished, she worries that the latent neurological effects of the disease are finally catching up with her. Amazed at the suggestion, Sacks checks Natasha’s spinal fluid and indeed she tests positive for neurosyphilis, which had been stimulating her cerebral cortex. She is treated with penicillin, which eradicates the harmful spirochetes bacteria in her brain, but since the damage done is irreversible, Natasha’s feelings of friskiness and euphoria, to her relief, don’t subside.
Miguel O.
Like Natasha K., Miguel O. also contracts neurosyphilis; however, his condition is considerably further developed. A farmhand from Puerto Rico with both speech and hearing impairments, Miguel communicates best with Sacks through drawing. Sacks shares four different figures demonstrating Miguel’s attempts at a simple exercise where he is instructed to copy a drawing of a square with a circle and an X inside of it. Before being treated, Miguel ignores the instructions and uses the original drawing as a jumping-off point for an entirely different drawing: first of a three-dimensional box, then of a boy flying a kite. Sacks describes him as surging with energy, with “thoughts and feelings flying everywhere” (104). After Miguel begins taking Haldol, however, he dutifully completes the drawing exercise “with none of the elaborations, the animations, the imagination, of the others” (105). Feeling down, Miguel asks Sacks if everything will feel “dead” when he is treated.
Mr. Thompson
William Thompson is a patient with Korsakov’s syndrome who reaches a frenzied state of “confabulatory delirium” (110) after suffering a high fever. Like Jimmie G., Mr. Thompson has almost no short-term memory; however, he is also stuck in a continually heightened state of narrative invention. He ceaselessly invents facts about who he is, where he is and who he is talking to, at first addressing Dr. Sacks as a customer at his grocery store, then as his “old friend Tom Pitkins” (108), then as a kosher butcher, and so on. Sacks writes that Mr. Thompson comes across at first as a cheerful comic, who constantly has an amusing story or character on the tip of his tongue. However, as he continues to talk, he becomes disquieting to others. Tragically, his sense of personhood has been lost in a kaleidoscopic array of illusions and inventions. Sacks describes his stream of narration to be both excited and indifferent, “as if it didn’t really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered anymore” (112).
Bob
Mr. Thompson’s younger brother. In the midst of his stream of falsehoods and confabulations, Mr. Thompson looks out the window and says “[a]nd there goes my younger brother Bob, past the window,” (112). Sacks is dumbfounded when a minute later, the man peeks his head through the door and introduces himself as Mr. Thompson’s younger brother. Although Mr. Thompson recognizes Bob initially, he does not maintain a recognition of who Bob is, losing him in his ongoing whirl of delirium.
Mrs. B
Mrs. B is a former research chemist whose personality changes suddenly after a large tumor develops in her frontal cortex. Sacks describes her as high-spirited and volatile, full of quips and wise-cracks. When she talks with Dr. Sacks, Mrs. B interchangeably calls him “Father,” “Sister” and “Doctor,” respectively because of his beard, his white uniform and his stethoscope. When asked why, she says “I know the difference, but it means nothing to me. Father, sister, doctor--what’s the big deal?” (116.) She demonstrates a similar apathy towards the difference between left and right, which makes it difficult for Dr. Sacks to test whether Mrs. B can accurately discriminate between the two. Often it seems like she says the wrong answer just to be funny. She reports that reality has become completely meaningless to her, which shocks and troubles Dr. Sacks. Mrs. B, however, is not perturbed at all.
Grey-haired woman in her sixties
Described in Sacks’ chapter on “The Possessed,” this woman was observed by Sacks on the streets of New York City. Sacks classifies her as a super-Touretter, one whose tics are so constant and forceful that they have subsumed her entire personhood. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, the woman is doing ludicrous, exaggerated impressions of every person who passes by. Sacks writes: “This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self, became nobody” (123). After what Sacks describes as “a build-up of pressures,” the woman turns into an alley and, with the appearance of being violently ill, expels abbreviated and accelerated versions of every gesture, posture, expression, and demeanor of the forty-to-fifty people who had passed.
Mrs. O’C
88 years old, Mrs. O’C wakes from a dream about her childhood in Ireland and finds that the music she heard in the dream is still playing in her ears. Although Mrs. O’C is hard-of-hearing, the music is loud and clear, almost deafening. After visiting an otologist and a psychiatrist, she comes to Dr. Sacks for help. Sacks writes that Mrs. O’C is overall in excellent health, and isn’t taking any medication. Wondering if the music might have been caused by a stroke, Sacks orders EEG scans of her temporal lobes. The scans confirm that Mrs. O’C’s temporal lobes are having small seizures, which are causing auditory hallucinations. These specific hallucinations are what Sacks calls “reminiscence”: a sudden, vivid surge of lost memory. After three months, the music gradually dies down. However, Mrs. O’C tells Dr. Sacks that she misses hearing the songs. Having come to the United States at a young age, Mrs. O’C has almost no conscious memories of her life in Ireland. Mrs. O’C says that “It was like being given back a forgotten bit of my childhood again. And some of the songs were really lovely” (134).
Mrs. O’M
Similar to Mrs. O’C, Mrs. O’M is a partially deaf woman in her eighties who comes to Dr. Sacks because of the music in her head. She also sometimes hears ringing, hissing, rumbling, and several voices talking at once in the distance. Mrs. O’M heard three different hymns: “Easter Parade,” “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” and “Good Night, Sweet Jesus.” Over four years these tunes continued to play, and they’d grown to be quite annoying. “It was like some crazy neighbour continually putting on the same record,” she tells Sacks (135). The songs would come on loudly and suddenly, drowning out all other sounds. She reports that the music is most vivid when she wakes up in the morning, and that it’s least likely to occur when she is emotionally, intellectually, or visually occupied. Just as in the case of Mrs. O’C, EGG scans of Mrs. O’M’s temporal lobes registered “strikingly high voltage and excitability” (136). Her hallucinations go away as soon as Dr. Sacks puts Mrs. O’M on anticonvulsants. Unlike Mrs. O’C, she is nothing but glad to be rid of the music.
Dmitri Shostakovich
A 20th-century Russian composer who is supposedly able to hear vivid music by leaning his head to the side. This is due to a metallic splinter in his brain, which X-rays “allegedly” showed pressing against Shostakovich’s temporal lobe when he tilted his head.
Case 2770
Featured in a study by Dennis Williams in 1956, this individual had major epilepsy “induced by finding himself alone among strangers” (143). His epileptic seizures are incited by a vivid memory of his parents at home, an experience he describes as “marvelous.” Though Williams provides no further details, Dr. Sacks goes on to posit a significant link between the subject’s original experience of feeling lonely and his subsequent experience of feeling back at home with his parents. “I cannot help thinking,” Sacks writes, “that if one has to have seizures, this man, Case 2770, managed to have the right seizures at the right time” (143).
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sacks cites a quote from the Russian writer and philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky, who suffered from epileptic seizures: “You all, healthy people, can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit … I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the joys that life may bring” (144, Sacks’ italics).
Rose R.
The case of Rose R., featured in Sacks’ book Awakenings, is discussed again in the short chapter “Incontinent Nostalgia.” Rose is a 63-year-old woman “who had had progressive postencephalitic Parkinsonism since the age of 18 and had been institutionalised, in a state of almost continuous oculogyric ‘trance’, for 24 years” (151). In other words, Rose had spent most of her life in a hospital ward, conscious, but barely able to move or express herself. After taking L-Dopa, Rose experiences “a dramatic release from her Parkinsonism” (151) and for the first time in her adult life finds herself able to move and speak freely. Rose reports that along with the effects of L-Dopa, she is suddenly able to recall memories and sing songs that she hadn’t thought of for over forty years. Sacks surmises based on this account that Rose “(like everybody) is stacked with an almost infinite number of ‘dormant’ memory-traces, some of which can be reactivated under special conditions, especially conditions of overwhelming excitement” (152).
Bhagawhandi P.
Bhagawhandi is a 19-year-old young woman from India who has had a brain tumor since the age of seven. Although the tumor was cut out when she was seven, it returned eleven years later, now malignant and impossible to remove. After having multiple seizures, she is admitted to hospice care, knowing that she has only a few weeks more to live. Sacks remarks that despite the tragedy of her situation, she remains in remarkably good spirits. As the tumor continues to expand, her seizures become more frequent. However, instead of fully losing consciousness during her seizures, Bhagawhandi becomes “dreamy,” (154) experiencing vivid, sweeping visions of landscapes, gardens, and homes from her childhood. Sacks wonders if these visions are due to temporal lobe seizures, or if perhaps Bhagawhandi is hallucinating from the massive dose of steroids in her bloodstream. Seizures in the temporal lobe tend to produce fixed, stereotyped experiences -- a single unvarying scene or song. Her dream-states also don’t appear to be “over-cathected” or emotionally charged in the way that vivid dreams often are. Gradually these visions come more often and grow deeper until they occupy most of Bhagawhandi’s day. Although she remains conscious and lucid, she maintains “a faint, mysterious smile” (155). Eventually, she becomes unresponsive, still with a look of calm happiness on her face. “Three days later she died,” Sacks writes, “or should we say she ‘arrived’, having completed her passage to India?” (155.)
Stephen D. / Dr. D.
Stephen D. is a 22-year-old medical student who, after having a dream that he was a dog, becomes acutely aware of his sense of smell. “I awoke to an infinitely redolent world,” Stephen reports, “a world in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell” (156). Sacks makes note of the fact that Stephen has made a habit of using cocaine and PCP (phencyclidine, also called “angel dust”). This sudden realignment of the senses makes Stephen’s environment “overwhelmingly concrete, of particulars” (157). After three weeks, his normal senses suddenly return. Years later, now a young colleague of Dr. Sacks, Dr. D. says that he is nostalgic for the “smell-world.” “So vivid, so real!” he remarks. “It was like a visit to another world, a world of pure perception, rich, alive, self-sufficient, and full” (158).
A gifted man who sustains a head injury
Mentioned briefly in the postscript to Stephen D.’s story, this unnamed man entirely loses his sense of smell after severe damage to his olfactory tracts. He remarks that life without smell is more bleak and distressing than he could have imagined. Months after his injury, the man is shocked and overjoyed when he begins catching whiffs of his morning coffee and his pipe. After running tests, his doctors conclude that he still has complete anosmia (blindness to smell), and shouldn’t be able to smell anything at all. Sacks posits that the man’s cortex, which was not damaged in the injury, is producing controlled olfactory hallucinations in situations that were previously fraught with associations of smell, such as smoking or having coffee in the morning. Although these compensations are reported often among the blind and deaf, Sacks writes that he has no idea how common they are among those with anosmia.
Donald
The tragic subject of Sacks’ chapter entitled “Murder,” Donald killed his girlfriend during a PCP-induced seizure. Although Donald was given sodium amytal and put under hypnosis, he was unable to remember anything about the event. At trial it was determined that Donald had not repressed the memory; rather, the seizure had caused an utter, incurable amnesia during the murder. He spends four years in a psychiatric hospital and takes to gardening. During the fifth year, he is given occasional parole, and he buys a bicycle so that he can go on weekend rides. However, he almost gets in a head-on collision and falls off his bike, sustaining a major head injury that puts him in a two-week coma. After regaining consciousness, Donald is in horrific distress, crying and struggling violently. He says that he is beset with repeated, hallucinatory visions of his girlfriend’s murder. “He now knew the minutest details of the murder,” Sacks writes. “[A]ll the details revealed by forensic examination, but never revealed in open court -- or to him” (163, Sacks’ emphasis). Unable to control these hallucinations, Donald attempts suicide twice while in the neurosurgical unit and has to be tranquilized. EEG scans reveal “incessant, seething” epilepsies in both of his temporal lobes, extending deep into the emotional circuitry of his brain. Through medication and years of psychotherapy, Donald has returned to gardening. Though he has not forgotten the murder, he no longer experiences traumatic visions of it. “The final therapy, as Freud said, is work and love,” Sacks concludes (164).
Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098, is a German nun known for accounts and figures of her mystic visions, which she experienced throughout her life. Sacks includes illustrations and written accounts of Hildegard’s visions in order to highlight the immense and indescribable feeling of awe and wonder at the onset of an epileptic seizure, which Sacks writes is “indisputably” the source of Hildegard’s visions.
Rebecca
Rebecca is 19 years old when she is referred to Dr. Sacks’ clinic. She has a partial cleft palate, short, stumpy fingers, and a degenerative myopia that requires her to wear glasses with thick lenses. Due to a congenital condition, she has severe cognitive defects, and in many ways, according to her grandmother, she is still much like a young child. She loves her grandmother deeply and is very fond of nature. She’s also quite taken with stories, and although she is illiterate, she frequently demands that her grandmother read to her. Sacks remarks that Rebecca has no difficulty interpreting and understanding symbols and metaphors, even in deep and complex poetry. When she comes to Sacks for the first time, Rebecca proves to be totally inept at every cognitive test he administers. However, the second time they meet is outside, on a bench near the clinic. After hearing her make a few remarks about the world coming to life in spring, Sacks begins to think of Rebecca as “an idiot Ecclesiastes” (180). While the clinic is designed to bring out a person’s deficits and inadequacies, in the real world Rebecca demonstrates a calm and profound connection with what Sacks calls “the concrete.” Rebecca’s grandmother dies, and afterwards, Rebecca is enrolled in a variety of workshops and classes with the hopes that she might overcome her developmental limitations. These classes prove to be ineffective and frustrating. Having gained a sense of clarity and decisiveness after her grandmother’s death, Rebecca tells Dr. Sacks that she wants “no more classes, no more workshops … They do nothing for me. They do nothing to bring me together” (184). Instead, she joins an acting class, which Sacks says she loves and excels in. “[N]ow if one sees Rebecca on stage, for theater and the theatre group soon became her life, one would never even guess that she was mentally defective” (185).
Rebecca’s grandmother
Rebecca’s primary caretaker, who passes away soon after Rebecca is introduced to Dr. Sacks.
Martin A.
A 61-year-old man who is admitted into hospice care in late 1983. Martin suffered a near-fatal bout of meningitis as an infant, which for the rest of his life caused seizures, mental deficits, and impulsive behavior. However, Martin has an incredible musical memory; he tells Sacks that despite not being able to read music, he knows over 2,000 operas. Although his voice is “gruff, with some spastic dysphonia,” (187) Martin sung in local church choirs for many years and performed at both the Met and at Lincoln Center. He has a photographic (eidetic) memory, but this fantastic ability has helped very little to develop Martin’s understanding of the world at large. His only true interest is music, which he had spent his life completely immersed in. For example, he knows by heart, in its entirety, the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a nine-volume collection. Sacks writes that Martin is often childish, spiteful, prone to tantrums, and blows snot into his sleeve. “These childish characteristics, topped off by his irritating, eidetic showing off, endeared him to nobody” (190). Martin doesn’t fare well in hospice, quickly showing signs of regression. When asked what’s the matter, he says that he needs to go back to church to sing. Sacks reports that, when Martin returns to church, it is a sudden and dramatic change. With a renewed sense of purpose and belonging, all that had been defective about Martin appears to fall away: “... the stigmatised retardate, the snotty, spitting boy -- disappeared; as did the irritating, emotionless, impersonal eidetic. The real person reappeared, a dignified, decent man, respected and valued now by the other residents” (192). This solution proves to be of radical help, and Martin continues living in hospice feeling both healthier and more whole.
Martin’s father
A famous opera and oratorio singer, who in his retirement loves to sit with Martin and listen to records, sing from musical scores, and read Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians aloud.
Harriet G.
A patient featured in a 1970 case study by David Viscott. Despite being socially and intellectually impaired, Harriet has extraordinary musical powers, and can compose and improvise music in the style of any well-known composer. Her encyclopedic knowledge is quite similar to Martin’s; years ago, she memorized the first three pages of the Boston Yellow Pages and could call up any person’s phone number upon request.
John and Michael (The Twins)
John and Michael live in a state hospital and have been variously diagnosed with autism, psychoticism, and severe retardation. Sacks describes them as “a sort of grotesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee, indistinguishable, mirror images, identical in face, in body movements, in personality, in mind, identical too in their stigmata of brain and tissue damage” (196). When Dr. Sacks meets the twins in 1966, they are already famous for their feats of memory and mental calculation. They have been featured on radio and television shows for their ability to almost instantly calculate the day of the week, given any date in the next 80,000 years. They are also able to repeat back three-hundred-digit numbers with the ease of repeating a three-digit number. Despite these uncanny abilities, John and Michael “cannot do simple addition or subtraction with any accuracy, and cannot even comprehend what multiplication or division means” (197). Sacks writes that, one day, a box of matches falls to the floor in front of the twins, and John and Michael simultaneously cry out “111.” This proves to be the exact number of matches on the floor. Further, they murmur the number 37 three times after calling out 111. When asked why, they respond in unison: “37, 37, 37, 111.” 37, a prime number, goes into 111 exactly three times. Sacks speculates that John and Michael share a preternatural “sense” for indivisible quantities. To pass the time, they sometimes have entirely numerical conversations -- calling up enormous prime numbers (verified later by Sacks) of six figures or more.
Sir Herbert Oakley
A nineteenth-century music professor from Edinburgh who once correctly identified the squealing of a pig as a G-sharp.
Zacharias Dase
A famous German mental-calculator from the 1800s, who could instantly identify the number of peas poured out on a table without having to count them.
Ernst Toch
An Austrian composer who, according to his grandson, could memorize a long string of numbers after hearing them only once. Toch was able to do this by converting the string into a melody that corresponded to the numbers.
Jedediah Buxton
A famous English mental-calculator who became obsessed with converting music and drama into arrays of numbers.
Nadia
Featured in a famous study by Lorna Selfe, Nadia is a non-verbal autistic child with a “phenomenal gift” for drawing. After intensive therapy, Nadia begins talking but loses her interest in drawing.
The Parks Family
David and C.C. Parks are married autism researchers who have an autistic daughter, Ella. Ella is a highly gifted drawer who is also fascinated with prime numbers from a young age.
José
José is a “thin, fragile-looking” (214) young man of about 21 who suffers from violent seizures. He is said to be “hopelessly retarded” (214), unable to speak or understand most words, and constantly in a state of restlessness. After having a high fever at the age of eight, combined with the onset of “incessant” seizures, José rapidly became autistic. Inundated with seizures, he dropped out of school and entirely disappeared from society for fifteen years. After having a massive fit of violent rage at home, José is brought to a state hospital. During testing, Sacks finds that José is quite compelled by drawing. When asked to draw Sacks’ pocket watch, José focuses on it intently and produces a copy that, while proportionally a bit off, is precisely, strikingly detailed. Sacks marvels at José’s ability to bring out “[t]he general grasp of the thing, its ‘feel’ “ (215). After reproducing other drawings, José proves to be a naturally gifted artist. His drawings are not simple carbon-copies; they have a life and a character that the original pictures don’t possess. After years of living in his ward, José has become the hospital’s artist-in-residence, drawing flowers in the garden, creating mosaic altarpieces for churches, carving the lettering on tombstones, and hand-printing sundry notices. Sacks laments the fact that José will likely spend the rest of his life overlooked and unappreciated by the outside world.
José’s ward attendant
This attendant has no faith in José’s mental capacities, telling Dr. Sacks that José is “just an idiot” (215).
José’s father
A passionate illustrator and drawer, who took José outside to sketch objects before José began having seizures.
