American Masters (1985–…): Season 35, Episode 9 - Oliver Sacks: His Own Life - full transcript

Listen, can you repeat

your question...
- Yes.

- More shortly?
- Mm-hm.

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.

- We can do whatever you want.
- Yes.

- You were...
- 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.

Eh.

Incidentally, 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.

I'm also going to
say something which,

if you want, for the moment,

is off-record.
- Yes.

- Oh, fuck.

I'm afraid some
of my, oh, bugger.

Sometimes it's fuck, and
sometimes it's bugger.

And sometimes it's both,
sometimes it's bugger fuck.

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 is 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.

Eighteen 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.

- Good.

Oh, yes, yeah, yeah,
let me introduce.

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!

- 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 Doctor 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?

- 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
use 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.

- 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.

And 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.

- 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 is,
how was that possible?

What in this person's
life had made it

so that he might
have this insight?

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 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 so easy
for a child of 10 or 11.

When the Battle
of Britain began,

all kids were being
evacuated to the countryside,

but especially kids whose
parents are 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.

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
six, 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,

drop tungsten on your foot.

- 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.

- 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."

And 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.

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.

- 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.

- 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 fucking
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.

- 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.

- 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 like 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 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 spurted semen
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
half way 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 he 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 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 body
building.

He was absolutely
built like an ox.

And so he'd 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.

- 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 fuck-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 putdown.

- It was an absolute disaster,

and I was sort of
flung out of that.

They said, "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.

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.

- 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!'"

- Ans 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.

- 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's 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.

- 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,

to the apartment
next to Beth Abraham,

where I'd 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 realist 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 a 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 quite well-received,
didn't sell especially well

and was absolutely dismissed
by fellow neurologists.

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 have always been a dreamer.

I think there is 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.

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.

I was flown to England
and operated on

to repair the torn quadriceps.

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.

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.

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
could be disarmingly

or shockingly honest
about himself.

He was a handful.

- Hi, Yolanda.

The Jell-O is
particularly good today.

What are you thinking?

- I daren't tell you
what I'm thinking.

All right, okay, I will.

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.

It 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.

I knew I shouldn't have said it.

Did I say something?

- He was a man of the extremes,

- Yes.
- He was immoderate

in all possible directions.

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's 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.

- 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 just 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.

- 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.

- 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 the 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 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,

a 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, nice to see you again.

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's syndrome.

- Well, they used to think

that people on the autism
spectrum had no inner world.

Well, 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 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.

In Parkinsonism, parts of
the brain are damped down

and low in dopamine, and
tend to make one immobile.

I feel 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's Syndrome,

parts of the brain are
spontaneously hyperactive.

- They're firing spontaneously,

tch, tch, tch, tch,
are 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.

And I got a call one day,

he said, "Hello, 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 you have to.

So he came up right away, he
was there in about week or so.

He spent a few days with me.

It's not even real!

- This is the Charcot library,

and here...
- Smells sweet,

do you smell that sweetness?
- Right, yeah.

- The books have a sweet,
an old sweet smell?

- Okay, well, you're
getting very close

to your original description.

- Oh, oh, my friend, !

- Oh.

Oh, nice to see you!

- Yes pleasure, yes.

Okay, and...

- Oh!

- And Tourette's personal
description of seven Shanes.

- Seven, seven Shanes?

So meeting him was wonderful.

I felt, I said, 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.

People think he was saying,
"Look at the others."

He's not saying that.

He's saying, "Look at us."

Dad, Dad!

As a whole human race.

Dad!

- His body movements are
so sudden and violent.

He wasn't
searching for a panacea.

- Look here, Shane.

- 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
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 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.

- Thanks very much.

- He began to get
invitations to lecture

both in medical schools...
- Welcome

Dr. Sacks.
- And in cultural institutions

open to the public.

Saying, "Come and speak to us.

Clinical career.

- 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
is it like to be me?

What does it feel is
it like to be you?

What's the exact relationship
between the body,

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.

- 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 Christoph 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 a 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.

- 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's 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, time and music,

time and movement.

- Soon after that, in
fairly quick succession,

he publishes "Musicophilia,"
about music and the brain.

He publishes "The Mind's Eye,"

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 why they
wanna become neurologists.

He has really made
a generational,

made a historic difference.

- 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 realize 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 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!

This is the first one,
hot off the press.

And with my sexy
picture on the cover.

- 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
Gardens 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.

The night after he
got his diagnosis,

he took out a little
pad, and he wrote a list.

And that became
kinda 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.

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.

I haven't yet given way,
fully, perhaps to emotion.

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 a 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 five 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.

You know what the
old Jewish toast

is, L'Chaim to life?

To you, to you, to you, to you.

Especially...
- You must have

some song that you sing at 79.

- Uh, oh, um.

- To Oliver.
- To Oliver.

- All right, thank you.

To life.

Everything
about Oliver was extreme.

He was extremely large
and exciting to be around.

His appetite was incredible.

One day he told
my sister Caroline

that he wished he
were a blue whale

because then he could
swim the ocean forever

with his mouth open as
billions of plankton and krill

came his way.

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.