On The Move: A Life

"This record of time pouring through the unclenched fingers of the mind’s most magnanimous patron saint has become one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life — one I came to with deep reverence for Dr. Sacks’s intellectual footprint and left with deep love for his soul."

"This record of time pouring through the unclenched fingers of the mind’s most magnanimous patron saint has become one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life — one I came to with deep reverence for Dr. Sacks’s intellectual footprint and left with deep love for his soul."

"One of the reasons I got interested in neuroscience was because of the way Oliver Sacks uses stories to illuminate science. He took people on the margins, with neurological syndromes — like the man who had an injury which meant that the part of his brain that processes faces no longer worked, he was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat — and told us the reality about what it was like to be that person. His stories are brimming with life, they are full of little things that make you feel for the character. Another great story he wrote was An Anthropologist on Mars . This was about a woman with Asperger’s who said she couldn’t really understand the motives of other people. She felt like an anthropologist on Mars trying to understand and develop an empathic response to others. Her name is Temple Grandin and she actually has a PhD in animal husbandry. She designs abattoirs and creates the most humane situation for these animals before they are killed. She finds it difficult to understand other people, so she designs a machine she can control. She understands what empathy is, but she’s never been on the inside. She reads novels but she doesn’t crawl inside the narrative of those who are telling stories. I’ve chosen Oliver Sacks’s autobiography because it tells us about how he became the man who wrote those books. It’s a story that is, in many ways, like The Children’s Book . It’s about a young man growing up in London, and being sent off to boarding school in the 1940s with his brother. The school’s headmaster was sadistic, and that created a scar on his life he never fully recovered from. It’s also about a brilliant student who came up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, which is my own college, and studied medicine here. It’s a story about how he had to come to terms with his homosexuality, which his mother didn’t really approve of, and he nevertheless had to live with. It’s about his loves, and the life that he led. He moved to America, and it’s about him going to California and living the Californian lifestyle and riding motorcycles. The title of book, On the Move, is from a wonderful poem by Thom Gunn about these men who are always on the move in their black leathers. It’s about how, in California, he became a weight-lifter and a Californian record holder. It’s also about his amphetamine habit — how he would spend weekends just living through his addiction. It’s about how, eventually, his mother and father died and how it was then that he had to come to terms with who he was. He moved back to New York, where he had spent some time before, and became the man who wrote Awakenings . He had always been very interested in his patients, but he finally plucked up the courage to actually write about them and to show that strong empathy for them that comes through in all his writing. “In general novels are all about emotions: If they are not about something that moves us then we stop reading them.” What is interesting is that science usually is all about numbers, it’s all about randomised control trials. Oliver Sacks is a different kind of scientist. He takes his mantra from Alexander Luria, the great Russian psychologist who, amongst other things, wrote The Mind of a Mnemonist , about a man who could not forget. The implications of being unable to forget were then famously made into a short story by Borges called Funes the Memorious , where he talks about somebody like Luria’s famous patient S. This mix of science with literature makes Borges suggest that to think is to forget a difference, to be able to abstract. If you remember everything, then everything becomes the same. If you always just see the specifics as opposed to the generalities, it’s impossible to work out first principles. But you have to understand the specifics in order to make the jump to generalisation. What we get from the stories Oliver Sacks tells is the possibility of thinking about otherness. It’s about thinking how things could be otherwise in very specific ways, and then how we can generalise that to the human condition. That is the power of his writing for me. The question is: could one be truly emotionless? Could one be an android dreaming of electric sheep, as in Philip K. Dick ’s books? What is it like to be somebody without emotions? I think there are very few examples. I think Temple Grandin has emotions: the molecules we talked about earlier are just not formed in the way found in what autists sometimes call neurotypicals. Pain and pleasure remain — even in psychopaths. They have a keen sense of their own pleasures, it’s just they never regard those of others as being important. In fact, they sometimes take pleasure in other people’s pains. I think what connects us, this human web, the social aspect, is what permits empathy. A book I would have liked to have included today is a book on empathy called The Handbook for Revolution by Roman Krznaric . It’s about what it means to be human, what it means to empathise with other people, and whether that can be taught, which we are now exploring in the Empathy Museum . I think the science of that is at the heart of what a science of emotion should be: it’s about understanding our own emotions but we cannot understand our own emotions without understanding those of others. The way that Oliver Sacks’s books work is that they show us what it’s like to be another and they then make us empathise, even if we cannot imagine, or we find it very difficult to imagine, what it’s like not to be able to see faces, or not to be able to empathise, or not to be able to see colour. In one of his famous stories, there’s somebody who is a painter who cannot see colour, and yet he is able to reproduce colours in his paintings. What does that mean? What does that mean in terms of how the brain works?"

"Reading this New York Times essay by Oliver Sacks in mid-August moved me so much that I immediately picked up On the Move, his memoir, and was completely absorbed. It’s an intimate, generous and insightful reflection on Sacks’ full and varied life: the shock of his mother’s rejection when she learned he was gay; his forays into weightlifting, fast motorcycles and drugs; his exceptional career as neurologist and writer; his late-life experience of love in his 70s; and, always, his curiosity and empathy for others. The book is so powerful that when this great scientist-humanist died (two weeks after I turned the last page) it felt like a personal loss."