Sacks also describes cases of phantom limbs, pain, of someone who could see only the right half of their world, and a man who could not remember his life after 1945. She could not tell where her arms or legs were apart from seeing them and had to learn to function by sight rather than by this sense of ourselves we take for granted. One of the other cases described in this section was of a woman who lost all sense of her body, a loss of what is called proprioception. His visual agnosia left his musical abilities untouched, and with accommodations was able to continue in this work. Hence at one point, when getting dressed to go out, he grabbed the top of his wife’s head, thinking it a hat. He could describe them in detail, but he did not know what he was seeing.
P, a musician and teacher, while the cause remained undetermined, he could not identify the objects he was seeing. The title essay is found in the first section on losses, or cognitive deficits due to disease or damage to a particular brain structure. Each section is introduced by a clinical discussion followed by four to nine illustrative case histories. It is organized in four sections: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. Only now have I gotten around to what is probably his most famous work. Oliver Sacks is one of those authors I discovered in recent years, beginning to read him only shortly before his death in 2015. Summary: Brief case histories of twenty-four patients with unusual neurological conditions. New York: Touchstone, 2006 (originally published in 1985). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks.
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