Although my memory is generally lousy, I remembered parts of this book many years after having read it the first time. It was to brush up and polish those memories that I decided it was time to read it again. Sacks writes well and has amazing true stories to tell. Although it was all fascinating, it was the fourth part, that he calls The World of the Simple, where he talks about retardation, that really moved me. ( )

A very interesting book. There are some extreme cases in there. I found it fascinating how a person can be quite normal in some respects, but very abnormal in others, and that sometimes it can be hard for an outsider to notice the pathology.

Chapter 1 is the same as the title of the book. He examined the man once in his office that the man count not recognize visual images. Music was his key to coping with the world.

The book is divided into parts:
Losses
Excesses
Transports
The World of the Simple

a) Often the people are or seem quite unaware of their loss
b) The body and mind have marvelous coping power, sometimes enabling them to see or understand things that normal people don't detect.

Perhaps what makes this book feel so significant is that I don't feel very different from the people that he writes about. I mean that I don't feel that far from these kinds of disorder myself, and I feel that I could easily loose the rest of some central ability. Thus, I was interested in this book. I suppose that being poorly connected with other people would predispose a person to this kind of malady.

"Thus the feeling I sometimes have -- which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have -- that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily ..."

"We recognize this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose -- to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we -- so susceptible to words -- cannot trust our own instincts." (Page 82)

Some of the patient did not recover normal functioning. Some of the patients came up with effective adaptations. For example, the disembodied woman learned to adapt. The adaptations are powerful, but are also fragile, easily broken.

04/06/2006 Chapter 10 tells me how common it is for our human society to overlook a pathology or something unusual, or a phenomena until it is pointed out, and then it is noticed all over the place.

"In 1985 Gilles de la Tourette ... described the astonishing syndrome which now bears his name. 'Tourette's syndrome' ... is characterized by an excess of nervous energy..." p92
"In the years that followed ... many hundreds of cases ... were described." p92
"... Tourette's syndrome ... was scarcely at all reported in the first half of this century. Some physicians, indeed, regarded it as 'mythical' ... It was as forgotten as the great sleepy- sickness epidemic of the 1920's' p93 (encephalitis lethargica)
"In 1969 ... I started to speak of 'Tourettism', although I had never seen a patient with Tourette's." (p93)
"The day after I saw Ray, it seemed to me that I noticed three Touretters in the street in downtown New York. I was confounded, for Tourette's syndrome was said to be excessively rare.
... yet I had apparently seen three examples in an hour. ... The next day without specially looking, I saw another two in the street. At this point I conceived a whimsical fantasy or private joke; suppose (I said to myself) that Tourette's in very common but fails to be recognised but once recognised is easily and constantly seen.*"

A very similar situation happened with muscular dystrophy, which was never seen until ... 1850's. ... 'How come that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance -- a disease which has doubtless always existed -- how come that it is only recognised now? Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?'" p94

From the last half of the book I didn't copy out any quotations. However, I would like to observe that he has an appreciation for the beauty, complexity, and depth found beneath the simplicity of what we label as mentally handicapped. He found that people who are very awkward when we try to force them into our mold, can become very graceful and beautiful in their own environment.
(page 231)

"This brings us to our final question: is there any 'place' in the world for a man who is like an island, who cannot be acculturated, made part of the main? Can 'the main' accommodate, make room for, the singular? There are similarities here to the social and cultural reactions to genius. (Of course I do not suggest that all autists have genius, only that they share with genius the problem of singularity.) ..."

Wikipedia has a paragraph summarizing each chapter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat
( )

I'm not sure what to make of this. At one level it is very interesting, how damage or negative impact on the brain can present itself in so many and varied ways. And yet it feels a little bit like a parades of freaks. They are being presented to us as an exhibition, almost. The language, at times, feels dated. It is also very dense and technical, which for a non-specialist made this hard to follow at times. I can;t help feeling a bit uncomfortable at having acted the voyeur at someone else's troubles. ( )

I love this series of short stories. The human body is a fascinating thing and to hear real life stories of all the ways our body makes mistakes is funny and intriguing. I’ve collected the entire series of books and love them all. ( )

Interesting, but also boring after a while. Language was VERY outdated. ( )