On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
I was so excited by Gould’s vision of evolution that when asked by a newspaper in England what book I had most enjoyed in 1990, I selected Wonderful Life, his vivid evocation of the astonishing range of life-forms produced in the “Cambrian explosion” more than 500 million years ago (these had been beautifully preserved in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies) and how many of these had succumbed to competition, disaster, or just bad luck.
Steve saw this tiny book review and sent me a generously inscribed copy of the book, in which he spoke of it as “the geological version” of the sort of contingency, the inherent unpredictability, I had described in my postencephalitic patients. I thanked him, and he replied with a letter crackling with his special energy, exuberance, and style. It began:
Dear Dr. Sacks,
I was thrilled to get your letter. There can hardly be a greater pleasure in life than learning that an intellectual hero has enjoyed one’s own labor in return. I really do think that, in some collective sense but obviously without any contact, several of us are working towards a common goal rooted in a theory of contingency. Your work on case studies certainly goes together with Edelman on neurology, chaos theory in general, McPherson on the Civil War, and my own material on the history of life. There is, of course, nothing new about contingency per se. Rather, the theme has usually been seen either as something outside science (“merely history”) or, even worse, as a surrogate, or even a rallying point, for an unscientific spiritualism. The point is not to stress contingency, but to identify it as a central theme for a genuine science based on the irreducibility of individuality, not as something standing against science but as an expectation of what we call natural law, and therefore as a primary datum of science itself.
After discussing several other topics, he concluded:
Funny how once you get in contact with someone you wanted to meet for years, you begin to see things you want to discuss with him everywhere.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jay Gould
We did not, in fact, meet until a couple of years later, when a television journalist in Holland approached us to do a series of interviews. When the producer asked if I knew Steve, I had replied, “I’ve never met him, although we’ve corresponded. But nonetheless, I think of him as a brother.”
Steve, for his part, had written to the producer, “I desperately want to meet Oliver Sacks. I see him as a brother, but we’ve never met.”
There were six of us in all—Freeman Dyson, Stephen Toulmin, Daniel Dennett, Rupert Sheldrake, Steve, and myself. We were each interviewed separately and then, a few months later, flown to Amsterdam, where we were put in separate hotels. None of us had yet met the others, and there was a hope that there would be some wonderful (and possibly violent) explosion as the six of us came together. The thirteen-hour television show, called A Glorious Accident, was a huge hit in the Netherlands, and a transcript of the show became a best-selling book.
Steve’s own response to the show was characteristically puckish. He wrote, “I am astonished to see that our Dutch series was so well received. I certainly enjoyed meeting you all immensely, but I doubt that I would have been inclined to spend hours before a TV set watching such a conversation among a group of folks usually characterized in these p.c. days as dead white European males.”
Steve taught at Harvard, but he lived in downtown New York, so we were neighbors. There were so many different aspects to Steve, so many passions. He loved walking, and he had a huge architectural knowledge of New York City and what it looked like a century ago. (Only someone as intensely sensitive to architecture as he would introduce spandrels as an evolutionary metaphor.) He was extremely musical: he sang in a choir in Boston, and he adored Gilbert and Sullivan; I think he knew all of Gilbert and Sullivan by heart. On one occasion when we went out to visit a friend on Long Island, Steve basked in the hot tub for three hours, all the while singing Gilbert and Sullivan and never repeating himself. He also knew a huge number of songs from both world wars.
Steve and his wife, Rhonda, were impulsively generous friends, and they loved to host birthday parties. Steve would bake a birthday cake using his mother’s recipe, and he would always write a poem to recite. He was very good at this; one year he turned out a marvelous version of “Jabberwocky,” and at another party he recited this:
FOR OLIVER’S BIRTHDAY, 1997
This man, who’s in love with a cycad
But once could have starred in a bike ad
King of multidiversity
Hip! Happy birth-i-day
You exceed what old Freud, past head psych, had.
One legg’d, migrained, color blinded
Awak’ning on Mars, and hat-minded
Oliver Sacks
Still lives life to the max
While his swimming leaves dolphins behinded.
On another birthday, knowing that I loved the periodic table, Steve and Rhonda invited everyone to dress as a particular element. I am rather bad at names and faces, but I never forget an element. (There was one man who came to the party with my old friend Carol Burnett. I do not remember his name, and I cannot remember his face, but I will always remember him as argon.) Steve was xenon, element 54, another noble gas.
—
I eagerly read Steve’s monthly articles in Natural History and often wrote to him about subjects he raised. We discussed all sorts of things, from the place of contingency in the reactions of patients to our shared love for museums (especially the old cabinet type; we both spoke out for the preservation of the marvelous Mütter Museum in Philadelphia).
I also had a craving which went back to my marine biology days to know more about more primitive nervous systems and behaviors, and here Steve was an important influence in my life, someone who reminded me, incessantly, that nothing in biology made sense except in the light of evolution and chance, contingency. He put everything in the context of deep evolutionary time.
Steve’s own research had been on the evolution of land snails in Bermuda and in the Netherlands Antilles, and for him the vast range of invertebrates illustrated even better than vertebrates the range of nature’s inventiveness and its ingenuity in finding new uses for very early evolved structures and mechanisms of every sort—he called these “exaptations.” So we shared an appreciation for “lower” life-forms.
In 1993, I wrote to Steve of ways of joining particulars with generalities—in my own case, clinical narratives with neuroscience—and he replied, “I have long experienced exactly the same tension, trying to assuage my delight in individual things through my essays and my interest in generality through my more technical writing. I loved the Burgess Shale work so much because it allowed me to integrate the two.”
He was kind enough to read my manuscript for The Island of the Colorblind, and he did so closely, saving me from a number of blunders.
Finally, we had in common an interest in autism; as he wrote to me, “My reasons for respect are partly personal. I have an autistic son, who is one of the great day/date calculators—instantaneously, over thousands of years. Your piece on the calculating twins is the most moving essay I have ever read.”
He had written very movingly about Jesse, his son, in an essay later published in Questioning the Millennium:
Humans are storytelling creatures preeminently. We organize the world as a set of tales. How, then, can a person make any sense of his confusing environment if he cannot comprehend stories or surmise human intentions? In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature.
Steve had had a brush with death before I met him, when he was forty or so. He had a very rare malignant tumor—a mesothelioma—but was determined to beat the odds and survive this particularly lethal cancer. He was one of the lucky ones, aided by radiation and chemotherapy. He had always been an extremely energetic person, but after this experience
Twenty years later, at the age of sixty, he developed a seemingly unrelated cancer—a lung cancer in the chest that metastasized to the liver and the brain. But the only concession he made to illness was to sit while lecturing instead of standing. He was determined to complete his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and it came out in the spring of 2002, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his publication of Ontogeny and Phylogeny.
A few months later, just after teaching his final class at Harvard, Steve plunged into coma and died. It was as if he had kept himself going by sheer willpower, and then, having completed his final semester of teaching, having seen his final book published, he was ready to let things go. He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.
1. Cecil Helman, who came from a family of rabbis and physicians, was also a medical anthropologist well known for his cross-cultural studies of narrative, medicine, and illness in South Africa and Brazil. Deeply thoughtful and a wonderful teacher, he recounted his medical training in South Africa under apartheid in his memoir Suburban Shaman.
2. Many of the residents at Ealon House were chain-smokers (as are many “chronic” schizophrenic patients generally). I do not know whether they smoke from boredom—there was not that much to do at the residence—or for the pharmacological effects of nicotine, whether these are rousing or calming. I once saw a patient at Bronx State who was apathetic and withdrawn for the most part but would become first animated and then hyperactive, boisterous, almost Tourettic, after a few puffs of a cigarette. The attendant called him “a nicotine Jekyll and Hyde.”
3. Temple’s first book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, was published in 1986, a time when Asperger’s syndrome was barely recognized. In it, she spoke of her “recovery” from autism; at that time, it was generally felt that no one with autism could go on to lead a productive life. By the time I met her in 1993, Temple was no longer speaking of “curing” autism but of the strengths and weaknesses people with autism may show.
4. Many generations of Gregorys had been specially interested in vision and optics. In his book Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton traced the intellectual eminence of the Gregory family back to Newton’s contemporary James Gregory, who made important improvements to Newton’s reflector telescope. Richard’s own father had been the astronomer royal.
5. I later discussed such “snapshot” vision with Francis Crick and wrote about it in “In the River of Consciousness,” a 2004 essay for The New York Review of Books.
6. The series, called The Mind Traveller, explored a number of subjects I had long been interested in, including Tourette’s syndrome and autism. It also introduced me to some new experiences—with people with Williams syndrome (whom I would later write about in Musicophilia), with a deaf-blind Cajun community, and with a number of deaf languageless people.
7. When I returned, I transcribed the journal, and shortly thereafter I was invited to publish it as a book in a National Geographic travel series. There are whole pages of the published Oaxaca Journal that are identical with the handwritten journal, but I also enriched it with research on other things which had struck me during the trip—chocolates and chilis, mescal and cochineal, Mesoamerican culture and New World hallucinogens.
A New Vision of the Mind
Early in March of 1986, soon after Hat was published, I received a letter from Mr. I., an artist on Long Island. He wrote:
I am a rather successful artist just past 65 years of age. On January 2nd of this year I was driving my car and was hit by a small truck on the passenger side of my vehicle. When visiting the emergency room of a local hospital, I was told I had a concussion. While taking an eye examination, it was discovered that I was unable to distinguish letters or colors. The letters appeared to be Greek letters. My vision was such that everything appeared to me as viewing a black and white television screen. Within days, I could distinguish letters and my vision became that of an eagle—I can see a worm wriggling a block away. The sharpness of focus is incredible. BUT—I AM ABSOLUTELY COLOR BLIND. I have visited ophthalmologists who know nothing about this color-blind business. I have visited neurologists, to no avail. Under hypnosis I still can’t distinguish colors. I have been involved in all kinds of tests. You name it. My brown dog is dark grey. Tomato juice is black. Color TV is a hodge-podge.
Mr. I. complained that the dreary, “leaden” black-and-white world he now inhabited made people look hideous and painting impossible. Had I encountered such a condition before? Could I track down what had happened? Could I help him?
I replied that I had heard of such cases of acquired achromatopsia but never seen one. I was not sure if I could help, but I invited Mr. I. to come and see me.
Mr. I. had became colorblind after sixty-five years of seeing colors normally—totally colorblind, as if “viewing a black and white television screen.” The suddenness of the event was incompatible with any of the slow deteriorations that can befall the retinal cone cells and suggested instead a mishap at a much higher level, in those parts of the brain specialized for the perception of color.
Moreover, it became apparent that Mr. I. had lost not only the ability to see color but the ability to imagine it. He now dreamed in black and white, and even his migraine auras were drained of color.
A few months earlier, I had been in London for the publication of Hat when a colleague invited me to come along to a conference at the National Hospital in Queen Square. “Semir Zeki will be talking,” he said. “He’s the cat’s whisker on color perception.”
Zeki had been making a neurophysiological investigation of color perception by recording from electrodes inserted into the visual cortex of monkeys, and he had shown that a single area (V4) was responsible for the construction of color. He thought there was probably an analogous area in the human brain. I was fascinated by Zeki’s talk, especially by his use of the word “construction” in relation to color perception.
A whole new way of thinking seemed to ray out from Zeki’s work, and it set me thinking of the possible neural basis for consciousness in a way I had never considered before—and to realize that with our new powers of imaging the brain and our newly developed abilities to record the activity of individual neurons in living and conscious brains, we might be able to plot how and where all sorts of experiences are “constructed.” This was an exhilarating thought. I realized the vast leap which neurophysiology had made since my own student days in the early 1950s, when it was beyond our power, almost beyond imagination, to record from individual nerve cells in the brain while an animal was conscious, perceiving, and acting.
—
Around this time, I went to a concert in Carnegie Hall. The program included Mozart’s great Mass in C Minor and, after the interval, his Requiem. A young neurophysiologist, Ralph Siegel, chanced to be sitting a few rows behind me; we had seen each other briefly the previous year when I had visited the Salk Institute, where he was one of Francis Crick’s protégés. When Ralph saw that I had a notebook on my lap and was writing nonstop throughout the concert, he knew the bulky figure ahead of him had to be me. He came up and introduced himself at the end of the concert, and I recognized him at once—not by his face (most faces look the same to me), but by his flaming red hair and his brash, ebullient manner.
Ralph was curious—what had I been writing about through the entire concert? Had I been wholly unconscious of the music? No, I said, I was conscious of the music, and not just as background. I quoted Nietzsche, who used to write at concerts, too; he loved Bizet and once wrote, “Bizet makes me a better philosopher.”
I said I felt that Mozart made me a better neurologist and that I had been writing about a patient I had been seeing—the colorblind artist. Ralph was excited; he had heard of Mr. I., for I had described him to Francis Crick earlier in the year. Ralph’s own work was exploring the visual system in monkeys, but he said he would love to me
—
Ralph thought always in deep physiological terms, while neurologists, myself included, often content ourselves with the phenomenology of brain disease or damage, with little thought of the precise mechanisms involved and no thought at all of the ultimate question of how experience and consciousness emerged from brain activity. For Ralph, all the questions he explored in the monkey brain, the insights he so patiently collected one by one, always pointed to that ultimate question—the relationship of brain and mind.
Whenever I told him stories about what my patients were experiencing, Ralph would immediately pull me into a physiological discussion: What parts of the brain were involved? What was going on? Could we simulate it on a computer? He was a good natural mathematician, with a degree in physics, and he enjoyed computational neuroscience, making models or simulations of neurological systems.1
For the next twenty years, Ralph and I were great friends. He spent his summers at the Salk Institute, and I often went there to visit him. As a scientist, he was uncompromising, often blunt and outspoken; as a person, he was jovial, spontaneous, and playful. He loved being a husband and father to his twins—a family life in which I was often included as a sort of godfather. We both loved La Jolla, where we could go for long walks or bicycle rides, watch the paragliders hovering over the bluffs, or swim in the cove. La Jolla had become the neuroscience capital of the world by 1995, with the Salk Institute, the Scripps Research Institute, and UCSD being joined by Gerald Edelman’s Neurosciences Institute. Ralph introduced me to some of the many neuroscientists working at the Salk, and I started to feel myself part of this extraordinarily varied and original community.