♪♪♪
-Listen, can you repeat your question...
-Yes.
- ...more shortly? - Mm-hmm.
-I only have an attention span
of about 12 seconds.
- Shouting out... - So, are we rolling?
-I suppose I could always stand up if I wanted.
- You can do whatever you want. - Yes.
- You are... - I just felt like...
-The whole idea, Dr. Sacks,
is you can move anywhere you want.
-Okay.
-Now, listen, should I be, as it were, looking at you,
looking at you?
-Looking wherever your emotional kind of wherever...
-On analytic days... and Monday is an analytical day...
I have my Freudian cup for coffee.
I first saw my analyst in January of '66,
and so we are now in our 50th year,
and we're beginning to get somewhere.
- [ Laughter ] - Eh.
Incidentally, um,
when I first saw Shengold, my analyst, in '66,
I was taking a great deal of amphetamine at the time.
And I was sort of psychotic, or half-psychotic,
for much of the time.
And having a schizophrenic brother,
I once said to Shengold, "Am I schizophrenic, too?"
He said, "No."
And then I said, "Am I then merely neurotic?"
And he said, "No."
And we left it there.
[ Laughter ]
♪♪♪
Now, um, I'm...
I'm also going to say something
which, if you want, for the moment, is off-record.
- Yes. - Um. Oh [bleep].
I'm afraid some... some of my... Oh, bugger.
Sometimes it's "[bleep]," and sometimes it's "bugger."
[ Laughter ]
And sometimes it's both. Sometimes it's "bugger [bleep]."
I do a lot of cursing.
Multi-syllabic cursing.
♪♪♪
I've been asked,
"Are you a doctor first and then a writer?"
I think the real answer is that I'm equally both,
and, in important ways, they blend together,
and in a way, they can certainly be united
in case histories.
And one way or another,
I have been turning my life into writing.
♪♪♪
Mostly my clinical life,
but a certain amount of my personal life, as well.
♪♪♪
I'm an inveterate storyteller,
and I tell many, many stories,
some comic, some tragic.
I was about to say "some true, some untrue."
Sometimes a little tuning here and there.
♪♪♪
This was an earlier me, in an earlier incarnation.
I came to America in 1960 on my 27th birthday.
I'm now three times 27, or 81.
I never expected to make 80.
In fact, I never expected to make 40.
I was rather destructive when I was younger.
♪♪♪
Much of my life has been spent
trying to imagine what it's like to be another sentient being,
what it's like to be a bat,
what it's like to be an octopus,
what it's like to be anyone else, for that matter,
what it's like to be another human being.
I mean, we all have our solitary consciousnesses.
♪♪♪
18 months ago, I had a sense
of wanting to complete my life, whatever that meant.
And one thing was to try and look at it as a whole
and articulate it, which I've tried to do here.
Now, incidentally, are we on film? Was that all on film?
- Yes. - Good. Okay, good.
- Oh, yes. Everything's... - Good.
Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. And let me introduce.
Um, there is Hallie, who is one of my helpers.
Here is invaluable, unique Kate,
who has been my editor, collaborator, friend,
and ghostwriter for many years.
And somewhere or other, um...
Billy!
- He's right here. - Oh, there you are.
Here is Billy, who is a fellow writer
and who lives in the building
and to whom I dedicate the present book.
Despite all sorts of contradictions
and odd directions,
there does seem to be a single person here...
and one who, though seemingly unstable
and actually unstable in many ways,
has steadily tried to look at human nature
from the viewpoint of a clinical neurologist
who sees neurological disorders.
♪♪♪
- Here's Dr. Sacks. - Oh, hello.
Mr. Capparelli. How nice to see you again.
How are you doing?
- Fine. - Fine.
You think this is the condition which your mother had and...
- Yeah. - ...and her mother?
-Yeah, and her mother, yeah.
-Do you have any movement here at the fingers?
-He was a person with a question.
I think the question was always...
-Can you usually look at a newspaper most days?
-..."Who am I? Why do I feel these things?
Why don't I feel what other people feel?"
-What sort of work did you used to do, Mr. Capparelli?
-I was a foreman.
-But in order to answer his question,
his method was to look into other people.
-This illness, you look on the positive side.
-Yes.
-And you've been able to keep your spirits up...
-Oliver saw medicine a lot differently
from the way other people saw it.
He was trying to conceptualize
how people thought and how they saw the world.
-Okay. Bye, Elena.
-Oliver believed that there was some sort of
cognitive-perceptual inner world for everything
you saw on the exterior as a movement disorder,
as a tic disorder, or even as a dementia.
-Let me just look at you. I'm just going to...
-He was somebody for whom
the primary diagnostic question was,
"How are you? How do you be?"
He was extraordinarily empathic with his patients.
♪♪♪
-He was asking as hard as a person can,
"Who are you? I need to know.
I need to know more. I need to know even more."
And his attention would release people.
He could get secrets. He could learn things.
-Everything in...
-And then he will tell stories
about people in terrible trouble,
who are brave and special...
and full of heart...
paralyzed but not over.
He will take this thread of them,
and he will pull them out, pull them slowly out.
But what he also did simultaneously,
which was the great part,
is he pulled the whole world in the other way.
He would tell these stories so well
that other people... playwrights, actors, poets...
would pick up the stories he tells, retell them,
or tell them in their own way.
And the net effect is that people
who are lonely and left out...
autistic people, Touretters,
people in all kinds of mental difficulties...
are storied back into the world.
♪♪♪
-He was in a way the archetypal patient, not doctor.
The one who could see from inside
the person he had in front of him,
and the person was himself, first of all.
So that is a case which has no parallel.
-Dare I hug a sister?
-Doctor. Oh, surely. Take care of yourself.
It's wonderful to see you, Doctor.
-Thank you very much.
-Sister Lorraine at Little Sisters
said, "Clearly he has been through something.
You know, he never talks about it,
but, clearly, you don't get like this
without deep, deep experience."
-Life threw so many things at him.
Not finding his niche for a long time,
being ignored by colleagues, being criticized.
And then his own personal travails,
some of which he brought on himself,
he was the first to admit.
-He had always been very reluctant
to discuss certain parts of his life.
Most of his adult years were so troubled
that he really wasn't ready to explore that.
-Listen. I'm going to get on to a bit of narrative.
We've advanced now...
-But now he very much wanted to go on record,
not only in the book but on film,
to say, "What do I need to say before I'm done?"
♪♪♪
-There's quite a lot of things which are not in the book.
The most essential one is that
last month I was told that I had metastatic cancer
and that it's a matter of months,
maybe a year, if I'm lucky.
♪♪♪
-The day after he got the diagnosis
that melanoma had spread to his liver in early 2015,
he had really just delivered the manuscript of his memoir
two weeks before.
I called the publisher, and I said,
"We can't wait until September to publish this book
because Oliver may not be alive by then."
♪♪♪
It was very important to him to be alive to see it.
♪♪♪
[ Piano playing ]
♪♪♪
-This was my haunt for 40 years.
Beth Abraham, in the Bronx.
50 years later, coming in for a visit,
I think I'm sometimes looked at as if I were Lazarus.
"What, you here? You still vertical?"
♪♪♪
When the hospital opened, it was for people
with chronic neurological disease.
This particular area and floor was a horrific one.
♪♪♪
For people with severe dementia...
and also some people who were in coma or vegetative states.
♪♪♪
I came here in October 1966 and spent some months
getting to know all of the patients here.
And among them, I found some remarkable patients
who were motionless
and sometimes in strange postures,
many of whom had been admitted here
when the hospital opened in 1920
in the height of the epidemic of sleepy sickness.
♪♪♪
-It seemed to me that the great seminal moment in his life,
as a creative person, as a doctor, and as a writer,
is him arriving at Beth Abraham
and noticing that some of these patients
are not like the other ones...
and he has the moral audacity
to think that some of these patients,
not only are they different,
but they're alive, something's going on inside there,
which is a terrifying thought.
And the question was, how was that possible?
What in this person's life had made it
that he might have this insight?
♪♪♪
[ Birds chirping ]
-Our house was in Northwest London,
in Kilburn, near Golders Green,
at the intersection of two roads.
I was born there on July the 9th, 1933.
♪♪♪
Our family was a typical Orthodox Jewish
middle-class family.
From an early age, it was understood
that I was going to be a doctor.
My mother and father were both physicians,
and so were two of my three older brothers.
♪♪♪
-His father, Sam, was a classic GP.
He was part of the community. He was on call 24 hours.
People called him at all times of the day and the night.
-His mother, Elsie, also had a very busy practice
as a gynecologist and surgeon.
-She was clearly brilliant.
She was one of the foremost surgeons in England
and certainly one of the first women surgeons.
-It was an incredibly talented family.
And Oliver was the brilliant prodigy and favorite,
doted upon by all.
Effervescent, exuberant, enthusiastic,
but also painfully, painfully shy.
-I was accident-prone, always injuring myself.
I was face-blind,
and I suffered terrifying migraines.
My mother also had migraines, and she explained to me
how part of the brain would be affected for a while
then come back to normal.
My mother, we were close,
although it was perhaps an uneasy closeness,
and sometimes too close.
I think she wanted me to be like her.
♪♪♪
Sometimes, especially when I was very young,
she might deliver a baby or a fetus
with anencephaly, so-called,
with the top of the head missing and non-viable,
and she would sometimes bring a fetus home
and suggest I dissect it.
And that was not... not so easy for a child of 10 or 11.
[ Bombs exploding ]
♪♪♪
-When the Battle of Britain began,
all kids were being evacuated to the countryside,
but especially kids whose parents were doctors.
-We were all evacuated to a country town during the war,
but I was with my family.
Oliver had this separation to endure,
and, of course, it was devastating for Michael.
That seemed to have been the trigger
of Michael's problems.
♪♪♪
-My brother Michael and I were evacuated together
and spent 18 months at a hideous boarding school
in the Midlands.
We were bullied. We were beaten.
And I think the circumstances did something
to push my brother Michael towards psychosis.
♪♪♪
Soon after this, when he was 15, Michael became psychotic.
He was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
He could no longer sleep or rest,
but agitatedly strode to and fro in the house,
stamping his feet, glaring, hallucinating, shouting.
[ Young Michael shouting ]
I became terrified of him, for him,
of the nightmare which was becoming reality for him.
What would happen to Michael?
And would something similar happen to me, too?
♪♪♪
-The shadow of the brother
was immensely powerful in his mind.
The terror. The terror, simply.
♪♪♪
-The effect on my parents was devastating.
A sense of shame, of stigma...
of secrecy, entered our lives,
compounding the actuality of Michael's condition.
♪♪♪
It was at this time that I set up my own lab in the house
and closed the doors, closed my ears,
against Michael's madness.
I felt a passionate sympathy for him,
but I had to keep a distance, also,
create my own world of science,
so that I would not be swept into the chaos,
the madness, the seduction, of his.
♪♪♪
-He was very close to Michael.
Oliver cared very deeply about Michael.
He felt tremendous empathy and sorrow, as well,
that Michael's life had been allowed
to slide so far down the ravine.
Michael was one of the reasons
why Oliver did what he did professionally.
-Oliver's empathy didn't start with people.
It goes much beyond that.
The first friends he had, at 6, he says,
were numbers.
Numbers, then he went to minerals and metals at 10.
Then elements, plants came before.
And people.
Humanity was the very last thing.
That was a reaction to great suffering.
♪♪♪
-The love of chemistry and of the periodic table
was an absolutely constant with me from an early age.
I've loved the elements since I was 10 or 11.
I have a periodic-table bedspread on my bed.
I have shopping bags with periodic tables.
I have many periodic-table T-shirts.
And I have some periodic-table socks.
-From the very beginning,
he had a real relationship with inanimate objects.
He carried a periodic table in his wallet
like the rest of us carry a driver's license.
-I love it very much.
It stands for order, stability,
but it also stands for imagination and mystery.
-He liked to get an element for each year
to celebrate his birthday.
Number 77 is iridium.
And he came to my very primitive laboratory in London
10 years ago, and together we melted the iridium.
♪♪♪
-As I was going through my 70s,
I felt I was living through them all.
Hafnium, tantalum, tungsten.
Rhenium, 75.
Osmium, 76.
Iridium, 77.
Where's me platinum? Somewhere. 78.
If you doubt reality... - [ Thud ]
-...drop tungsten on your foot.
[ Children shouting ]
-I first met him at St. Paul's School in London.
At that time, Oliver was just oddly eccentric.
He was interested in biological classifications
and his interest in animals, and he would collect animals.
And minerals, as well.
He did weird things with his collections.
-He had lumps of sulfur and things
that he would throw out onto the lawn
to show that they exploded.
[ Explosion, fire crackling ]
-Both he and I and Eric Korn were all Jewish.
We were the only Jews at St. Paul's,
but we had no interest in being Jewish.
We were just "Jew-ish."
-I was in awe of my two closest school friends
Jonathan and Eric's intelligence
and couldn't think why they hung around with me.
Even though I was regarded as bright,
I never had much intellectual self-confidence.
But we all got scholarships to university.
-I went to Cambridge, and Oliver went to Oxford.
It was at that time, or a little bit later,
when they discovered that he was gay.
♪♪♪
-When I turned 18, my father thought this was the time
for a serious father-to-son talk.
We talked about allowances and money.
And then my father got on to what was really worrying him.
"You don't seem to have many girlfriends," he said.
"Perhaps you prefer boys," he continued.
"Yes, I do," I said.
"It's just a feeling. I've never done anything."
Then I added, "Don't tell Ma.
She won't be able to take it."
But my father did tell her.
And the next morning, she came down with a face of thunder,
a face I had never seen before.
"You are an abomination," she said.
"I wish you had never been born."
♪♪♪
My mother was speaking,
though I am not sure I realized this at the time,
out of anguish as much as accusation,
the anguish of a mother who,
feeling that she had lost one son to schizophrenia,
now feared she was losing another to homosexuality.
♪♪♪
She did not speak to me for several days.
When she did speak,
there was no reference to what she had said,
nor did she ever refer to the matter again.
But something had come between us.
Her words haunted me for much of my life
and played a major part in inhibiting
and injecting with guilt my sense of my own sexuality.
[ Bells ringing ]
When I got my scholarship to Oxford, I faced a choice.
Until then, I had been obsessed
with both science and literature,
but now I wanted to understand how the human brain worked.
It was my first step
towards becoming a clinical neurologist.
[ Flash bulb pops, clock chimes ]
-I saw practically nothing of him when he was at Oxford.
But we became acquainted with him once again
when he was doing medicine at the Middlesex Hospital,
and we would occasionally go in and see him in the ward.
And one would see him lifting weights
as he walked up and down amongst the patients.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
-I always felt insecure and shy and rather timid.
And I thought that if I became strong, physically strong,
this would alter my personality and I would become confident.
But it didn't work.
I became very strong but remained equally timid.
♪♪♪
I think maybe a specific contributor to shyness
has been my feeling of having had to live a life,
in a way, of dissimulation.
♪♪♪
It was not easy or safe
to be a homosexual in the London of the 1950s.
Homosexual activities, if detected,
could lead to harsh penalties, imprisonment,
or, as in Alan Turing's case, chemical castration.
♪♪♪
My house jobs came to an end in the spring of 1960,
and I was in state of uncertainty
about my own future at this time.
♪♪♪
I think I was quite resentful and carried resentment.
I was... Especially on the matter of sexuality,
I was angry with my mother, I was angry with religion,
I was angry with England,
I was angry with [bleep] homophobic society...
although I partly shared the homophobia,
mostly directed at myself.
♪♪♪
In June 1960, I told my parents
I would be leaving England on my birthday, July the 9th,
on an extended vacation
and might not return for a while.
[ Motorcycle engine passes ]
-His great luck, I suppose, was to leave England,
to leave the source of a lot of his pain,
and to come to sunny California,
where there's guys, weights, drugs, and hospitals,
and, you know, great teachers.
He found that.
I mean, that's an American success story.
Not many people are that lucky.
Where do you go when your mother calls you an abomination,
is you go to San Francisco and stop writing home.
[ Rock music plays ]
[ Weights clanging ]
♪♪♪
-Soon after arriving in San Francisco,
I got an internship at Mount Zion Hospital.
I think I felt something of a split in myself,
which actually went with my names, Oliver Wolf Sacks.
Oliver was the kindly doctor... Dr. Oliver.
And Wolf was the lupine part of myself,
which would put on my leathers and get on my bike
and sort of be a lone motorcyclist at night,
with a peculiar sense of freedom and wildness.
♪♪♪
-I think he was exploring possibilities
for an adult life
that was an expression of who he was.
And I think he was attempting
to create an adult self that was authentic.
♪♪♪
But I think what he was really looking for was a partner.
♪♪♪
-I first met Mel working out
at the Central YMCA early in '61.
He was in the Navy, stationed in San Francisco,
and he trained when he could at the Y.
And we became friends.
There was an erotic element for me,
but no explicit sexual element.
-They were muscle-builders.
What they were into was motorcycles, faster and faster,
scuba diving deeper and deeper, weightlifting more and more.
It was very incarnate.
-I liked to push myself to the maximum,
so I bulked up to about 280 or 290
and, to my delight, was able to set
a California weightlifting record,
a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders.
♪♪♪
In 1962, Mel's Navy service was coming to an end.
I was committed to moving to Los Angeles
for a three-year residency in neurology at UCLA.
♪♪♪
As the summer approached,
Mel and I had arranged to share an apartment
in Venice, California,
close to Muscle Beach Gym, where we could train.
♪♪♪
And evenings could be a strain.
Mel liked being massaged
and would lie naked face-down on his bed
and ask me to massage his back.
I would sit astride him, wearing my training shorts,
and pour oil on his back.
It would bring me to the brink of orgasm.
♪♪♪
On one occasion, I could not contain myself
and [bleep] all over his back.
I felt him suddenly stiffen when this happened,
and without a word, he got up and had a shower.
♪♪♪
The next morning, Mel said tersely,
"I have to find a place of my own."
I felt desperately lonely and rejected when Mel moved out,
and I wondered whether it was my fate
to fall in love with straight men.
♪♪♪
I rented a little house in Topanga Canyon,
and I resolved never to live with anyone again.
And it was at this juncture
that I had turned to drugs as a sort of compensation.
♪♪♪
-We encountered each other on the neurology ward at UCLA
in October of '62.
I was a psychiatry resident.
Oliver was a neurology resident.
In the mornings, we would gather for rounds,
and Oliver was a continually disruptive presence.
♪♪♪
He would drift away from the group.
At times, he would be halfway down the hallway
at the patient's tray eating the leftover food.
And I remember many occasions
when the chief resident flew into rages
and was yelling and screaming at Oliver,
calling him back.
He was this brilliant, generous, empathic,
loving person who couldn't find his way.
♪♪♪
Raw talent in abundance,
but a tremendous amount of unhappiness and confusion,
and, uh, not knowing what direction to go in.
There were a lot of drugs then, handfuls of drugs,
which suggests something
of the casual, self-destructive element in it.
♪♪♪
-In the irresistible thrall of amphetamines,
sleep was impossible, food was neglected.
I gave little thought to what this was doing
to my body and my brain.
I did and did not realize that I was playing with death.
♪♪♪
-He would take milkshakes of speed,
ten times more than would kill a normal person,
and to be able to account for that,
you had to talk about his bodybuilding.
-[ Grunting ]
-He was absolutely built like an ox.
And so he would get on his motorcycle
and motorcycle without stopping, except for gas.
36-hour, nonstop.
♪♪♪
I would set out for the Grand Canyon,
500 miles away.
I would ride through the night, lying flat on the tank.
And crouched like this,
I would hold the bike flat out for hour after hour.
♪♪♪
Sometimes I felt I was inscribing a line
on the surface of the Earth,
poised motionless above the ground,
the whole planet rotating silently beneath me.
♪♪♪
If I held the bike near its maximum speed,
I could reach the Grand Canyon in time to see the sunrise.
♪♪♪
[ Bird calling ]
-Oliver was already at this point.
One of a kind. There was no other like him.
One patient that I remember very well,
we would see her when we went on rounds.
This very, very deteriorated woman.
And what Oliver did was he went in there one day,
and he took her out,
and he took her to his motorcycle,
and he took her for a ride on his motorcycle.
And I was stunned by the gesture,
just the simple act of giving that he had for this woman.
It's extraordinarily unconventional,
and it was typical of Oliver.
-On one level, I can't put together
the weight-lifting, motorcycle-riding,
drug-imbibing, self-destructive Oliver Sacks
with the careful, gentlemanly, fastidious person
of exuberant, enthusiastic
observation and curiosity about people.
On the other hand, the connecting part for me
is that, in all respects, he was deeply an outsider,
floating in and out of the periphery,
just barely hanging on.
I have to think that virtually every professor,
every attending physician
who'd seen him and helped mentor him
must have been flabbergasted
to discover he became anything in his life.
He was a kind of supreme [bleep]-up
at multiple times along the way.
♪♪♪
-When I finished my residency at UCLA in 1965
and came to New York,
I thought I would try and become a bench scientist.
So I got an interdisciplinary fellowship
in neuropathology and neurochemistry
at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
-Well, that ended up badly.
Because, although he worked in detail on earthworms...
all his data flew off his motorbike
on the Cross Bronx Expressway,
and he didn't have copies.
And, well, anyway, he was clumsy in the lab.
So, at that time, they said,
"I think you'd better go see patients."
Which was, I'm sure, perceived as a put-down.
♪♪♪
-It was an absolute disaster,
and I was sort of flung out of that.
They said, you know, "You're a menace, Sacks.
Get out. See patients. You'll do less harm."
♪♪♪
Part of it was my drugging had increased
when I got to New York.
I had started to call in sick for days at a time.
I was taking amphetamines constantly
and eating very little.
On New Year's Eve 1965,
I looked at my emaciated face,
and I said, "Oliver, you will not see another New Year's Day
unless you get help."
♪♪♪
"There has to be some intervention."
And so, the beginning of '66,
I sought out an analyst,
who insisted that this would only work if I gave up drugs.
And he said, "You're putting yourself out of reach,
and you have to stop.
Otherwise, we won't get anywhere."
♪♪♪
Six months later, I started seeing patients,
partly chronic patients at Beth Abraham Hospital
but also patients with migraine in a headache clinic
just up the road at Montefiore in the Bronx.
And I was fascinated, and moved very much,
by hearing people's stories, their experiences of migraine
and how deep and strange these could be.
♪♪♪
I started reading about the subject,
and I found myself driven to the older literature...
and, in particular, to an old book I found
called "Megrim" by Edward Liveing,
published in the 1870s.
In February of '67, as I was struggling to give up drugs
and still mourning the fact that I did not have what it took
to be a research scientist,
I had one last drug high.
But instead of surrendering to mindless ecstasy,
I started reading this 500-page book
with great concentration.
I identified with Liveing.
I almost saw his patients as my own.
I was deeply moved by his descriptions.
I read through the whole book in a state of ecstasy.
And with the amphetamine in me, sometimes it seemed to me
that the neurological heavens opened
and that migraine was shining like a constellation in the sky.
♪♪♪
I resolved to write a comparable book,
a "Migraine" of my own, a "Migraine" for the 1960s,
incorporating many examples from my own patients.
It would be the first book I ever published,
and I never took amphetamine again.
I didn't need it anymore.
Nor have I touched it since...
and partly because of this
and partly because life became and work became
much more interesting.
This was really the start
of a remarkable turning point in my life.
In the fall of 1966,
I started seeing patients at Beth Abraham,
a chronic-disease hospital affiliated with
the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
♪♪♪
I soon realized that among its 500 residents,
there were some 80 patients, dispersed in various wards,
who were survivors of the extraordinary
encephalitis lethargica, or sleepy-sickness pandemic,
which had swept the world in the early 1920s.
♪♪♪
Many were frozen
in deeply Parkinsonian or catatonic states,
and some of the patients had been like this
for 30 or 40 years.
♪♪♪
The nurses, who knew these patients well,
were convinced that behind their statuesque appearance,
locked in, imprisoned,
there were intact minds and personalities.
♪♪♪
The nurses also mentioned
that the patients might have occasional,
very brief liberations from their frozen states.
Music, for example, might animate the patients
and allow them to dance, even though they could not walk,
or to sing, even though they could not speak.
♪♪♪
What fascinated me was the spectacle of a syndrome
that was never the same in two patients,
a syndrome that could take any possible form,
a syndrome that included an enormous range of disturbances
occurring at every level in the nervous system.
[ Monitor beeping ]
A syndrome that could show, better than any other,
how the nervous system was organized.
♪♪♪
It had been established in the late 1950s
that the Parkinsonian brain
was deficient in the transmitter dopamine,
and I wondered whether L-DOPA
could help my own very different patients.
♪♪♪
The license to use L-DOPA took several months to come,
and it was not until March of 1969
that I embarked on a double-blind trial
with six patients, putting three on L-DOPA.
♪♪♪
-And suddenly there's this incredible flowering.
♪♪♪
-There was a thrilling beginning,
an exhilarating beginning,
and everyone shared this exhilaration.
We were all a bit manic and euphoric.
♪♪♪
And within a few weeks,
the effects of L-DOPA were clear and spectacular.
♪♪♪
And I decided to offer L-DOPA to every patient.
♪♪♪
[ Birds chirping ]
♪♪♪
-I once asked one of his patients,
"Do you remember when you first came to?"
And she said, "Oh, yes," very quietly.
"Suddenly, I was talking."
And I said, "Do you remember your first words?
After not having been there for 30 years,
what were your first words?"
She said... "I said, 'Ooh, I'm talking!'"
♪♪♪
-And after her awakening in 1969,
Rose immediately burst into fluent talk
about Gershwin and others who were around in the 1920s.
And I asked her... She was a very bright woman.
She said, "I know it's 1969, but I feel it's 1926."
She said, "I know I'm 64, but I feel I'm 21."
She said, "Nothing much has happened in the last 43 years."
So there had been not quite unconsciousness, not sleep,
but some strange timeless suspension of consciousness.
♪♪♪
At first, nearly all the patients' responses
were happy ones.
There was an astonishing, festive awakening that summer,
as they burst into explosive life
after having been almost inanimate for decades.
♪♪♪
But then almost all of them ran into trouble,
developing specific side effects of L-DOPA,
sudden and unpredictable fluctuations of response,
and extreme sensitivity to L-DOPA.
♪♪♪
Some of the patients would react differently to the drug
each time we tried it.
♪♪♪
I tried altering the doses, titrating them carefully.
But this no longer worked.
There seemed to be, with many of the patients,
nothing between too much L-DOPA and too little.
♪♪♪
The system now seemed to have a dynamic of its own.
What was going on was so complex,
in both neurological and human terms,
that I felt a need to keep detailed notes and journals,
as did some of the patients themselves.
I started carrying a tape recorder and a camera
and, later, a little Super 8 movie camera.
Because I knew that what I was seeing
might never be seen again.
I had to have full biographic detail,
along with full sort of biological insight.
I mean, this was a point
where biology and biography intersected.
♪♪♪
All my patients are at this intersection.
I mean, all of us are at this intersection.
-[ Shouting ]
-Ms. Sandoval. Ms. Sandoval.
-There were times in the first year
when everything went bad, when I wondered
what sort of awful situation I had got the people into.
And one of the patients said,
"That stuff should be given its proper name, hell-DOPA."
♪♪♪
The majority said later they were glad they had it.
But not all of them.
♪♪♪
Rose said very clearly that everything and everyone
which had had meaning for her was gone.
She didn't like our world,
and she said this quite explicitly.
And after 10 days of this extraordinary awakenings,
she went back into this state, with her head thrown back
and the eyes gazing
at infinity, or nowhere.
And despite altering the medication,
we could do nothing,
and she stayed like this for another 10 years.
♪♪♪
Was this physiologically necessitated?
Was it a defense against an intolerable anachronism?
I don't know.
It was, you know, an infinitely complex situation.
♪♪♪
-The breakthrough with awakenings
is that there are no breakthroughs.
I mean, you try with chemistry, you try with surgery,
you try with all kinds of things to change things, you know,
but then there comes a point where you're dealing with
not just the human condition, but the condition of life.
The breakthrough is that you come to live within your means
and that the project of the doctor and the patient
is, together, to find a way
of living with what can't be changed.
The whole point of his practice
was to spend hours together
trying to compose the story which will help them go
from being just abandoned objects in the corner
to being subjects of their own lives.
That is his basic insight, a sense of biography
where you wouldn't think there's a biography.
The layer on top of that is being able to help people
experience themselves as stories
and, together, to turn their situation
into a narrative, into a story.
So that the storytelling in Oliver,
it's not just spinning tales.
It is also that he is, himself, on a therapeutic basis,
giving people a sense of narrative,
that narrative itself is therapy.
-1972 remains sharply etched in my memory,
with the awakenings and tribulations of my patients.
The previous three years had been a time
of overwhelming intensity.
Such an experience is not given to one twice in a lifetime.
Its preciousness and depth, its intensity and range,
made me feel I had to articulate it somehow.
It seemed to me that I needed to return to London,
to go home to write.
♪♪♪
-Despite the fact that his mother
had laid this awful curse on him,
in fact, Oliver never stopped writing home.
He was very close to her.
She was such an important figure in his life.
And he returned again and again
to home, 37 Mapesbury,
to his childhood, to his family,
to a milieu that he knew so well.
[ Birds chirping ]
-My mother had been fascinated
when I told her about my post-encephalitic patients.
She had been urging me to write their stories,
and in the summer of 1972,
she said, "Now. This is the time."
♪♪♪
I spent each afternoon writing or dictating
the stories of "Awakenings."
She would listen intently, always with emotion,
but equally with a sharp, critical judgment,
one honed by her own sense of what was clinically real.
♪♪♪
In a sort of way, then,
we wrote many of the case histories
of "Awakenings" together that summer.
And there was a sense of time arrested, of enchantment,
a privileged time, out from the rush of daily life,
a special time consecrated to creation.
♪♪♪
In September, I returned to New York
and to the apartment next to Beth Abraham,
where I had been living since 1969.
♪♪♪
I was there on November the 13th,
when my brother David phoned me to say that our mother had died.
She had had a heart attack during a trip to Israel.
♪♪♪
My mother's death was the most devastating loss of my life,
the loss of the deepest and, perhaps in some sense,
the realest relation of my life.
It made me feel that I must complete "Awakenings"
as a last tribute to her.
When the formal mourning was over,
I stayed in London and returned to writing,
with the sense of my mother's life and death
dominating all my thoughts.
And in this mood, I wrote the later sections of "Awakenings"
with a feeling, a voice, I had never known before.
♪♪♪
-When "Awakenings" came out in 1973,
Oliver described the on-off effect of L-DOPA.
This had never been seen by doctors, neurologists
who took care of Parkinsonism.
Because they had never seen it,
they were very suspicious that this was embellishing...
that this was somebody who wanted to make a splash
and was exaggerating.
Not creating completely,
but exaggerating, embellishing.
Neurologists didn't know what to make of this guy,
and so they sort of didn't embrace him.
-There's a misconception about Oliver
that he became famous with the book "Awakenings,"
but the hard truth is that the book,
though it was quite well-received,
didn't sell especially well
and was absolutely dismissed by fellow neurologists.
[ Plane engine roars ]
♪♪♪
-July the 9th, 1973, was my 40th birthday.
I was in London.
"Awakenings" had just been published.
And I was having a birthday swim
in one of the ponds on Hampstead Heath
when I met a handsome young man
with an impish smile on his face.
It was just as well
that I had no foreknowledge of the future,
for after that sweet birthday fling,
I was to have no sex for the next 35 years.
♪♪♪
-He was celibate for 35 years.
This part of his life and personality
he sort of squelched,
and nobody knew anything about it.
You can imagine 20 years ago.
I mean, it was grounds for dismissal.
It was grounds for prosecution, for heaven's sakes,
in both America and in England.
If you're a physician, you could be defrocked.
I mean, no way.
It would have been suicide to talk about that.
♪♪♪
-I've always been a dreamer.
I think there was something secretly Utopian and dream-like
in the way in which I came to America.
The notion of a brave new world sexually
and a sense of freedom and openness.
I think, however, it did go along with a sense of dread.
I think I felt that things would be forced
by my coming here to such a low point,
such a point of despair and darkness,
that a make-or-break situation would come about.
I've done this more times than I like to think.
I certainly did it with my next book, "A Leg to Stand On."
I pressed towards the end, and I did all but kill myself.
♪♪♪
[ Doors open ]
[ Cart rolling ]
In 1973, I was working as a consultant
once a week at Bronx State Hospital
on a ward with youngsters who had autism
or childhood schizophrenia or fetal alcohol syndrome.
They had been warehoused together.
♪♪♪
This ward had a strong
behavior-modification philosophy
that behavior could be changed
by reward or punishment, especially punishment.
♪♪♪
And what they called therapeutic punishment,
isolating people, depriving them of food,
gave me the shudders.
At a Wednesday staff meeting,
I said that I thought the therapeutic punishment
was cruel, useless,
and maybe appealed to sadistic instincts in the staff.
♪♪♪
There was a deadly silence.
Then, a couple of days later, the ward chief came to me.
And he said, "There's a rumor going around the ward
that you abuse your young patients."
♪♪♪
That evening when I left the ward,
the director of the hospital said, "Don't come back."
I wanted to write a denunciatory book,
to be called "Ward 23."
And it was in this mood of rage and guilt and accusation
that I went off to Norway
in the summer of '74...
where I had a series of self-destructive accidents,
culminating in my encounter
with a bull on a mountain
and badly injuring my leg
and almost ending my life.
♪♪♪
I was alone.
I found myself face-to-face with a huge bull,
and I started to run.
Suddenly I was at the bottom of a cliff,
my left leg twisted grotesquely beneath me.
Eight long hours passed.
The temperature was going down.
Suddenly I heard a voice.
I saw two figures on a ledge. They rescued me.
♪♪♪
[ Helicopter blades whirring ]
I was flown to England
and operated on to repair the torn quadriceps.
[ Monitor beeping, machine hissing ]
But following the surgery, for two weeks or more,
I could neither move nor feel the damaged leg.
♪♪♪
No information was coming from the leg to my brain,
and none could be sent.
[ Crackling ]
I had lost the sense of ownership.
It felt alien, not a part of me,
and I was deeply puzzled, confounded.
♪♪♪
My English publisher exclaimed,
"You have to write about it all!"
This "Leg" book, in fact,
occupied 10 years of my life.
♪♪♪
-I began corresponding with Oliver in the late '70s.
I had read "Awakenings,"
which not that many people had done at that time.
This was a period, I subsequently realized,
when Oliver was in the middle of this incredible blockage
on what would become his "Leg" book.
[ Typewriter clacking ]
His blockage took the form of graphomania.
It wasn't that he couldn't write.
He wrote millions and millions and millions of words.
They were just the wrong words.
And he kept on getting stuck.
And the major reason he was stuck
was the issue of the credibility
of whether people would believe it.
-The medical profession
had not only rejected "Awakenings,"
they ignored it, they stonewalled him.
And he was, I think, undermined by that.
♪♪♪
-This period was nothing but really travail
and disappointment for Oliver and publications.
He was seeing patients in a variety of places,
and then he would go home and write.
He would send them in to major medical journals
like "Brain," and they would all get rejected.
He was rejected everywhere.
♪♪♪
-During all this time,
I continued to work on "A Leg to Stand On,"
much of it while swimming at Lake Jeff in the Catskills.
It was tremendously difficult to write.
There was draft after draft.
Sometimes the words and paragraphs and narrative
would come so urgently to my mind
that I would sort of rush out of the lake.
I didn't have time to dry myself.
And then I sent these yellow pads to my then-editor,
Jim Silberman, at Summit Books.
And he said...
"First," he said, "no one has sent me
a handwritten manuscript in 30 years.
And, secondly, this looks like it's been dropped in the bath."
He said, "I know no one who could do anything about this,
except one of our editors freelancing on the West Coast.
Her name is Kate Edgar.
She is amazing."
And, so, in 1982,
the soggy manuscript was sent to Kate.
And what came back was not only beautifully typed,
but had all sorts of interesting
critical and creative comments all over it.
-It took many, many rewrites and revisions
working with Kate to get that book completed,
but 11 years later,
"A Leg to Stand On" finally came out.
- Separate the sheets. - I understand.
-I came along about 10 years after his mother died.
And I became the person
who was encouraging, supporting,
critical but not condemning.
Open-minded.
I think in some ways our conversation
continued from the conversation
he would have with his mother.
But as an editor, I began to realize
that in order to keep him from getting stuck,
it was important for him to have almost a writing therapist
on call and there next to him.
So we did develop a way
of working back and forth
that was... very intensive.
♪♪♪
-Kate came as his editor,
but over the years, she became his everything.
I mean, Kate ended up doing everything for him.
Everything.
Finding a place to live,
buying his tickets for trips, making every arrangement.
I mean, the whole structure that he has around him
he owes to Kate.
-Oh, where did people put the music?
Oh, there, yes, I think there. - Maybe here. Maybe here.
-Hello, Yolanda.
Yolanda, you should be introduced to everyone.
- I know them. - You know them.
-Yes.
-Oliver initially struck me
as rather uncouth in many ways.
♪♪♪
-Oh. Stop. Too nervous to play.
-He was very fastidious, but at the same time
he didn't seem to care much about his appearance.
-What is that?
-He could be very shy
but at the same time he could be
disarmingly or shockingly honest about himself.
He was a handful.
-[ Clears throat ]
Hi, Yolanda.
The Jell-O is particularly good today.
[ Chuckles ] - What are you thinking?
-I daren't tell you what I'm thinking.
[ Laughter ]
All right, okay, I will. Um...
Time was...
It doesn't occur now,
but it used to occur until a few years ago,
when I would wake up at night with an erection.
This sort of erection
is actually nothing to do with sexual excitement.
Sometimes goes with a need to empty one's bladder.
Probably sometimes just with the autonomic stimulation
which goes with dreams.
And it was sometimes irritatingly persistent.
And I would sometimes cool my turgid penis
in orange Jell-O.
[ Laughter ]
Now, I... I...
I knew I shouldn't have said it.
[ Laughter ]
Did I say something?
-He was a man of the extremes.
-Yes.
-He was immoderate in all possible directions.
[Laughing] He was one of the most
childlike friends I ever had.
And up to the very last day, I think.
-Beautiful mother baby.
-In some ways, he was so separate
from the physical world,
sometimes not in tune with his own body.
But he seemed to feel an affinity somehow,
a need to embody others,
to physically act out what he was talking about.
Some people felt he had Tourette syndrome,
because he could rarely mention Tourette
without ticcing himself...
in a sort of very sympathetic way.
He found these ways to identify with all kinds of people,
whether they were Nobel physicists
or brilliant literary people
or the most compromised patient in a hospital bed,
sometimes even a person who couldn't speak.
He would imagine himself into them.
He had some unconscious way of sensing this.
That was the reason he was able to revive
the tradition of the case history
at a time in the late 20th century
when case histories were in disfavor,
because everyone wanted science and statistics
and quantitative medicine.
-[ Laughs ] Lovely.
-Oliver made the case always for qualitative medicine.
-You know, but sometimes...
-Writing, description, observation, sympathy.
And imagination.
♪♪♪
-In spending as much time with the patients
as he spent with them, he became involved in their lives.
He got to know them, he spoke to them all the time,
he saw them at home, he saw them in other places.
He kept detailed notes on every encounter he had
with most of his patients.
At a certain point, he knew them so well
he had no choice but, really, to chronicle them
and to pull these together as case histories.
-Now, during the 10 years he was working on the "Leg" book,
there was never a moment when he wasn't writing.
You have to understand that
he was writing up these case histories
that were piling up behind him, ready to come out.
-In 1983, a friend and colleague
asked me if I would join him in giving a seminar
devoted to agnosias, the peculiar inability
to recognize anything, including faces.
And at one point during the seminar, my colleague asked
if I could give an example of a visual agnosia.
I thought of one of my patients, a music teacher
who had become unable to recognize his students,
or anyone else, visually.
I described how Dr. P might pat the heads of water hydrants
or parking meters, mistaking them for children,
and how he even mistook his wife's head for a hat.
I had not thought of elaborating my notes on Dr. P
up to this point,
but that evening, I wrote up his case history.
I entitled it "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
and sent it off.
It did not occur to me that it might become the title story
of a collection of case histories.
-This was far from best-seller material.
A book of neurological case histories.
It was fascinating, but no one expected this
to be a popular success.
Sure enough, it was, and strictly by word of mouth.
-Please welcome Dr. Oliver Sacks.
[ Applause ]
-One year after "A Leg to Stand On,"
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
would really make his career explode and make his name.
-Here is a remarkable man of medicine.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Oliver Sacks.
[ Applause ]
-What amazed and moved me
were the letters which poured in.
The reality of the situations and struggles I'd written about
touched the hearts, as well as the minds of many readers.
They said, "You're a menace."
-He was the first major public intellectual
in the area of medicine
who really spoke about diseases to the general public
in a way that they could understand.
-His writing brought back a central aspect of medicine,
which is you treat the person and not the disease.
-I sometimes feel more at home
with my patients than with my neighbors, say,
but at some level I think we are all patients.
-We published, I think,
something like 29 or 30 pieces by him over the years,
on many different cases.
♪♪♪
-Each one of his people that he wrote about
was experiencing the world in a different way.
-Scientists know it's the brain that gives rise
to our conscious perception, to consciousness.
- Hello. - And we've been trying to
understand forever what's the relationship between the brain
and its various constituent parts
and the experiencing "I."
And Oliver Sacks, of course, was very good at studying
this experiencing "I," and what happens
in this condition or in that medical condition.
What is it to live with certain types of afflictions?
What is it to live with migraine attacks?
What is it to live without a memory?
What is it if you're stuck always in 1982,
as one of his patients was?
What does it actually feel like from the inside?
-There was the case, for example,
of the colorblind painter.
-This was fruit as Isaacson saw it.
Oliver found that the very absence of color
also revealed a certain basic sense of order.
-After a few weeks, "Mr. I"
started to feel that perhaps he was seeing
a more delicate world than others.
-He was also fascinated by Sign Language,
the language of immense complexity, subtlety.
It's not based on any system of communication we know.
It's an entirely separate language.
And it has its own charm and humor.
-He was constantly talking about taking off his white coat
and getting out of the clinic
and going into the world with people.
-Hello. It's nice to see you.
♪♪♪
What was that about?
-He was interested in how the person experienced that,
really getting inside the minds
of people that had various neurological differences.
-Oliver specifically wanted
to be in the skin of a person with Tourette syndrome,
with Temple Grandin, in the skin of somebody
who had Asperger syndrome.
-Well, they used to think that people on the autism spectrum
had no inner world.
Oliver really got emotionally where I was at.
That, he really, really understood.
He got inside my emotions in a way that other people hadn't.
It was sort of kind of mind-blowing.
-Oliver brought Temple Grandin to life,
in the full breadth of her humanity,
in his portrayal of her in
The New Yorker
and "An Anthropologist on Mars,"
simply by writing about
what she did and what she thought about.
He undermined stereotypes of autistic people
that had prevailed for decades.
-What you have to bring to the illness
and to the patient is you bring yourself.
You don't just bring a pocketful of medications.
You bring yourself, and you interact.
And throw it back.
In Parkinsonism, parts of the brain are damped down
and low in dopamine and tend to make one immobile.
I feel that one of my patients in particular
has taught me so much about Parkinsonism.
Right from the start, he thought Parkinsonism for him
had not presented as stiffness or tremor or motor symptoms,
but as a change in the quality of his dreams
and then of his imagination,
that an inner Parkinsonian landscape arose within him,
which had driven him towards art.
♪♪♪
Now, with Tourette syndrome,
parts of the brain are spontaneously hyperactive.
They're firing spontaneously.
Tch, tch, tch, tch! Sparking off.
-Oliver said that Tourette wasn't a deficiency;
it was an excess.
So I don't think of myself as less than normal.
I think of myself as more than normal.
-We met in 1987.
I remember exactly.
I got a call one day, and it said,
[as Sacks] "Um, um, hello?
Um, are you Shane Fistell, the young man with Tourette's?"
And I said yes. "I know who you are."
He said, "Well, I'm Oliver. Oliver Sacks.
I would like to come up to see you, if I may."
You don't have to stop for me.
♪♪♪
No, no, I know. I know... I know you have to.
So, he came up right away. He was there in about week or so.
And he spent a few days with me.
It's not even real!
-This is the Charcot Library, and, you know, here...
-It smells sweet. Do you smell that sweetness?
The books have a sweet... old sweet smell?
-Okay, well, you're getting very close
to your original description.
Ohh. - [ Smooching ] Oh.
Mon frere, mon frere. [ Laughs ]
Oh, nice to see you!
-My pleasure, yes. Okay, and, uh... uh...
-Ohh!
-And Tourette's personal description of seven Shanes.
-Seven... Seven Shanes?
So meeting him was wonderful.
I felt... I said it...
I felt good.
It was wonderful to have Tourette,
that I could revel in it and marvel at the good things.
It wasn't all negative and clinicized and pathologized
and reduced to a non-entity, you know?
Oliver invited people to look at themselves,
and people, when they're looking at people with disability,
they're also looking at themselves,
and they're afraid to look in the mirror.
So he was... People think he was saying,
"Look at the others."
He's not saying that.
He's saying, "Look at us...
Dad? Dad!
...as the whole human race."
Dad?
-His body movements are so sudden and violent.
-He wasn't... He wasn't searching for a panacea.
- Look here, Shane. - [ Laughs ]
You know, he's like a country doctor making house calls
to the whole world, you know, to the whole planet.
-How are you feeling, Mr. Benifontaine?
-His great gift was storytelling
about the human condition in a medical context
and humanizing each one of his patients...
and emphasizing not so much the loss,
as the richness of their experience, the difference,
the fact that they saw the world in different ways.
- There's no resistance here. - He always saw the particular.
He always saw each unique individual
and each unique patient.
And so that makes him a very astute observer
of the human condition.
As long as we have human nature, as long as we have experiences,
this is something that is for the ages
because that description is still gonna be valid
1,000 or 2,000 years from now.
♪♪♪
-He established himself first really in the literary realm,
but he did not want to see himself
as a literary person only.
He very much wanted to be accepted as a scientist,
and he couldn't understand why he couldn't be seen that way.
♪♪♪
-I do go my own way.
I may not be entirely easy to decipher.
I'm not easily categorized.
And I think this can give rise
to bewilderment and ambivalence.
Am I a writer or a doctor?
Where do I belong
in what is sometimes a fairly rigid hierarchy?
As the same time, I am haunted,
as someone who writes about patients,
by the fact that others have sometimes accused me
of exploiting them, betraying them.
There have been some very stinging comments.
-Not everyone appreciated him. He had his critics.
Someone described him as the man who mistook his patients
for a literary career, which is a low blow.
-I think that's completely wrong.
I think Oliver genuinely cared about his patients,
and I think the descriptions he had
of all these different kinds of neurological problems
gave tremendous insight.
For someone to say that he exploited his patients
by writing those articles, I think that's absolutely wrong.
-People would often come up to me and say,
"Sacks, what's your theory?"
I would say, "I don't have any theories.
I just describe. I just observe."
But there's no such thing as "just observing."
A great theorist of the brain and the mind, Gerald Edelman...
at one point he said to me, "You're no theoretician."
And I said, "But I am a field-worker. I show things.
And you need what I do to do what you do."
-New York, 1990.
Robin Williams and Robert De Niro
are rehearsing to be doctor and patient
in a new film, "Awakenings."
A Bronx hospital... - Hello.
- ...provides the film's setting. - Won't you join us?
Here's the exciting world of editing.
On a multi-million-dollar film, this is what it's come down to.
This, a box... sound dubbing equipment.
Ooh! Coming in for a close-up. For those of you who...
-Oddly enough, it wasn't until about 1990,
when the movie version of "Awakenings" came out,
that his profession really began to embrace him.
♪♪♪
All of a sudden, medical profession,
having held him sort of at arm's length for so many years,
now embraced him and began offering him honorary degrees,
honorary memberships in their institutions and academies.
- [ Applause ] - Thanks very much.
-He began to get invitations
to lecture both in medical schools...
-Please welcome Dr. Sacks.
-...and in cultural institutions open to the public...
...the museum again...
...saying, "Come and speak to us,"
because of this Hollywood movie, which I thought was ironic.
But perhaps he was a little ahead of his time,
or else a century behind his time.
-Oliver was an observer.
That's why in the beginning
Oliver didn't get respect from the science community.
See, some people think
that you have to have a hypothesis
and a controlled experiment to have science.
And I say, "Okay. What is astronomy then?"
The Hubble Space Telescope just looks at things.
It's observation.
Observation is part of science.
Because without observation,
you couldn't even make up a hypothesis.
What Oliver did is sort of like
the Hubble Space Telescope of neurology.
It's astronomy of the mind.
♪♪♪
-One thing we talked a lot about
was the hard problem...
consciousness, consciousness,
which concerned him totally in his writings.
He was obsessed.
He was obsessed with that, as, by the way,
every serious scientist is by now.
♪♪♪
-Much of my life has been spent
trying to understand the relation of brain and mind,
in particular, the biological basis of consciousness.
♪♪♪
-Consciousness ultimately is experience.
The essential core of consciousness
is the fact that it feels like something from the inside
to be a conscious being.
What does it feel like to be me?
What does it feel like to be you?
What's the exact relationship between the body...
in particular the brain, because we know it's the brain
that gives rise to conscious experience...
and our experience?
And Oliver always expressed a sense of wonderment
that literally, every day,
I wake up in a world of color and sound and fury,
and it feels like a miracle.
And he never lost that sense of wonder.
♪♪♪
-But for much of the early part of the 20th century,
mind and consciousness got somehow pushed out of science.
♪♪♪
For how could science explain learning?
How could it explain the reconstructions
and revisions of memory we make throughout our lives?
How could it explain the processes of adaptation,
of improvisation and creativity?
How could it explain consciousness,
its richness, its wholeness, its ever-changing stream,
and its many disorders?
How could it explain individuality or self?
♪♪♪
-For many years, scientists
tried to avoid this whole subject,
to avoid this word "consciousness."
And then they realized
that it was in the center of everything,
and now you cannot avoid it anymore.
-In 1979, Francis Crick,
who with James Watson had already won the Nobel Prize
for their work on DNA,
published "Thinking About the Brain,"
which, in a sense, legitimated
the study of consciousness in neuroscientific terms.
Prior to this, studies of consciousness
were felt to be irretrievably subjective
and, therefore, unscientific.
[ Crackling ]
-The new neuroscience excited Oliver hugely
and gave Oliver almost a new creative energy.
Oliver was trying to meld
the clinical presentations of these odd syndromes
with what these neuroscientists were studying.
And he began to understand that his role would be
to have a conversation with scientists like Francis Crick,
with Christof Koch, with Gerald Edelman,
about how his clinical insight could come together
with this highly conceptual work they were doing,
trying to understand the neural correlates of consciousness.
♪♪♪
-I first met Francis Crick
at a 1986 conference in San Diego.
When it was time to sit down for dinner,
Crick seized me by the shoulders and sat me down next to him,
saying, "Tell me stories."
In particular, he wanted stories
of how vision might be altered by brain damage or disease.
-They struck up a very intense relationship,
and Francis just kept on pumping for more information.
"Tell me more about this patient. What about that patient?"
♪♪♪
-Something which Crick and I spoke about
right at the very beginning was that,
in attacks of migraine,
sometimes the sense of movement would disappear.
And you would see a series of stills,
like stroboscopic illumination or film run too slow.
♪♪♪
-This particular type of migraine,
suddenly the sense of continuity is shattered,
and you see the world only as discrete frames.
[ Crackling ]
-I found myself wondering
whether the apparently continuous passage
of time and movement given to us by our eyes
was an illusion...
whether, in fact, our visual experience
consisted of a series of timeless moments
which were then welded together
by some higher mechanism in the brain.
♪♪♪
I called it cinematic vision,
and Crick was very, very interested in this.
-Of course, that's exactly what happens in a movie.
If you take something at 24 or at 30 frames,
each frame is a static frame,
yet we all see continuous motion.
But patients who have what's called akinetopsia,
an absence of seeing motion,
they typically have bilateral lesions
here in the back of the brain,
and to them the world looks like individual stills,
like a strobe light, but they don't see continuous motion.
And that tells us that there's some relationship
between specific parts of the brain
and particular aspects of consciousness,
that there is a particular part of the brain
that's just responsible for seeing the sense of motion.
So this illusion of motion
is revealed to be what it is, an illusion.
In fact, what the underlying reality are discrete frames.
That tells us something that may reveal the way,
actually, we perceive motion in particular,
and maybe the sense of time in general, the flow of time.
That is an interesting question that people now ask.
What are the mechanisms in our brain
that lead us to perceive duration and flow of time?
And that all came out of these observations by Oliver.
♪♪♪
-I found myself thinking of time.
Time and perception.
Time and consciousness.
Time and memory.
[ Children shouting ]
Time and music.
[ Piano playing ]
[ Crackling ]
Time and movement.
♪♪♪
-Soon after that, in fairly quick succession,
he publishes "Musicophilia," about music and the brain.
He publishes "The Mind's Eye."
It's about various mostly visual syndromes.
He publishes "Hallucinations."
And all of these books are deeply informed
by the neuroscience that's burgeoning at this time.
He becomes, at that point,
not only a man of the 19th century,
but a man of the 21st century.
And this, I think, was very deeply satisfying to Oliver
to be able to pull these things together.
He was also hugely relieved
to be accepted by his colleagues,
to get some of the recognition that he had sought.
♪♪♪
-I was in medical school, actually,
when I first came across his work,
and it was like a revelation to me.
His writing showed me there's truth and there's knowledge,
and there's important things about the human experience
that you just don't get from medical text books.
And there were truths to be found
in going deeply into people's lives
and seeing what happens to them and how it unfolds over time.
Arguably, Oliver Sacks is the most important person for me
in shaping my idea of what a doctor should be,
about what a good doctor is.
♪♪♪
-The head of Columbia's neurology department
recently said, these days, 70% of the applicants
to do neurology as a concentration
mention Oliver Sacks
as the reason they want to become neurologists.
He has really made a generational...
made a historic difference.
[ Piano playing ]
♪♪♪
-I have difficulty saying what constitutes home for me.
I've been 50 years in New York, but I'm not a citizen here.
♪♪♪
I often feel my home is a mental home,
in thinking, in medicine, in physiology, in science,
perhaps above all in writing.
When I am absorbed in writing,
I feel exempted from many of my own neuroses and problems.
I somehow seem to be in another realm
and a sort of timeless realm, as well.
Oops. Sorry. Bugger.
I don't know whether you've met my editor, Dan Frank.
- We met. - I think Dan
wants to give you something.
-So, Oliver, I realized that,
when I was thinking about this,
I first started reading you in The New York Review of Books
in the early 1980s, and when one of the pieces
from "Man Who" started appearing there.
And I realize it's, like, been one of the greatest things
in my career as an editor, is that I've had
this association with you.
And I feel like this is just
one of the finest books you've ever written.
-Ooh. Ah!
[ Laughter ]
-This is the first one. Hot off the press.
[ Laughter ]
And with my sexy picture on the cover.
[ Laughter ]
-Until his late 70s,
I think an enormously long stretch of his life
was a very eloquent,
careful groping for respect.
♪♪♪
And then Billy came along.
-In 2008, Oliver and I had had this little correspondence,
and I had paid a couple of visits on my trips to New York.
But I didn't know he was gay.
And it wasn't until I moved here
and we began to see more of each other
that we developed a relationship.
I think, in a way, as unexpected for me as for him.
Oliver had lived this very solitary life
and not had any long-term relationships.
♪♪♪
-We started to go out together,
often to the New York Botanical Garden,
which I had visited alone for more than 40 years.
It has been a great and unexpected gift in my old age,
after a lifetime of keeping at a distance.
♪♪♪
-I remember early on he took me for a walk
at the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx,
and he started telling me about his love of ferns.
And I asked him why,
and he said, "Ferns are survivors."
And that was his theme... survival.
It was the theme of the "Awakenings" patients,
their survival, which was so incredible and moving,
and which he had so much to do with...
and, at the end of his life, in a way, his own survival,
in articulating that and looking back on it.
-It was amazing for him, clearly,
but it was amazing to see someone in his late 70s
fall crazily in love
and solve such a deep problem that he had.
Somebody finally told him
you can love, you can connect,
and, therefore, you can begin to complete
this struggle you've made.
And the last four years, I think,
felt like an enormous sigh,
in so many directions...
to his friends, to his best friends,
to pretty much everybody.
He'd found balance.
-This was the poster for the event at Julius',
which is the oldest gay bar in New York City.
And they made their monthly party in May of 2015
themed Oliver Sacks,
featuring the photo from the cover of "On the Move,"
which is Oliver in Sheridan Square on his new BMW.
Over 50 years later, finally he's able to make the walk
from this apartment, arm in arm with me, to Julius',
to a gay bar, the first time in many, many, many years.
[ Siren wailing ]
[ Horns honking ]
The night after he got his diagnosis,
he took out a little pad, and he wrote a list,
and that became kind of the blueprint
for the essay "My Own Life,"
which he literally wrote within days of that,
almost in the draft that appeared in The New York Times.
♪♪♪
-"Three weeks ago, I felt that I was in good health,
even robust health.
But my luck has run out.
Last week, I had a biopsy and learned
that I have multiple metastases in the liver.
Now I am face-to-face with dying.
The cancer now occupies a third of my liver,
and though its advance may be slowed,
it cannot be halted.
It is up to me now
to choose how to live out the rest of my life
in the months that remain to me.
I have to make the most of what time I have,
to live it in the richest, deepest,
most productive way I can."
♪♪♪
So that's it.
♪♪♪
Um...
I don't know what the next months will bring.
I hope I can work and play
and love and be conscious
and be myself to the end, or almost to the end.
Um...
I haven't yet given way, fully, perhaps to emotion.
Um...
Uh...
I see tears all around me,
but I have yet to shed them myself.
♪♪♪
-The piece of information that he delivered,
that he had only about six months to live,
was accurate, horrifyingly so.
And everyone who knew him was distraught by this
and wondered what he was going to do,
how he was going to react to it.
-The last time I saw Oliver
was just about 10 days or two weeks before he died.
He was writing, writing in his characteristic way.
And I said, "What are you doing?"
And he said, "I'm writing about creativity."
-It was a visit like any other visit.
We didn't talk about his illness very much.
It was totally un-morbid,
remarkably non-stressful.
Non-emotional. No tears. No goodbyes. No hugs.
"This is the last hug I'm giving you in your life."
None of that.
♪♪♪
-I saw him in May of this year, and we talked about his plans
for writing various essays and writing a book on worms.
And we talked about Charles Darwin's last book,
which happens to be also about earthworms.
I left a dying man in a very positive mood.
I was uplifted by my conversation with him,
strangely enough.
-When I got the call from Kate,
I was woken up by a text message arriving.
It was 5:00 in the morning. That Oliver had just died.
And I found myself, oddly,
with a great, great swelling, welling up, of gladness.
The word I had was not sadness. It was gladness.
He'd really pulled it off. He nailed it.
He nailed the landing.
He gave a master class in how to die.
♪♪♪
-"There will be nobody like us when we are gone,
but, then, there is nobody like anybody, ever.
When people die, they cannot be replaced.
They leave holes that cannot be filled.
It is the fate, the genetic and neural fate,
of every human being to be a unique individual,
to find his own path, to live his own life,
to die his own death.
Even so, I am shocked and saddened
at the sentence of death,
and I cannot pretend I am without fear.
But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
♪♪♪
I have loved and been loved.
I have been given much.
And I have given something in return.
I have read and traveled and thought and written.
I have had an intercourse with the world,
the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being,
a thinking animal on this beautiful planet,
and this, in itself, has been
an enormous privilege and adventure."
♪♪♪
-Do any of you know what the old Jewish toast is?
L'chaim? To life?
To you. To you. To you.
To you.
Especially...
- To Oliver. - To Oliver.
- All right. Thank you. - Cheers.
-To life.
♪♪♪
-Everything about Oliver was extreme.
He was extremely large and exciting to be around.
After a long, chilly swim once off Long Island,
we sat on the beach and spoke about his life and work.
Oliver said that he saw himself like a comet,
hurtling through the neurological heavens,
observing things as he went speeding by,
constantly in motion and not bound to a home.