On the Move: A Life

 By Oliver Sacks

I thought that the life of Oliver Sacks would be interesting, but I did not know that it would take me into weightlifting culture, motorcycling, the gay scene of the 1960s, and the philosophy of consciousness. Perhaps I could have guessed the latter, as his books that I know of (but haven’t read) are about consciousness and perception. But the incidents of his life – as selected and highlighted here – show him as an impetuous, obsessive and deeply thoughtful personality – the sort of person you would enjoy spending an evening with if he were not also rather shy and withdrawn.

Fortunately, though, like many shy people, when you get him going on his subject he can ramble on endlessly with fascinating details. He does ramble more or less chronologically through his life, stopping at various points to describe anecdotes of his experiences. He jumps around a bit, and over some chunks of his life, but the anecdotes he tells seem to be at key incidents that led to insights about himself or about the psychology of the mind. For example, his initial repressed homosexuality in London in 1959 contrasts with his jump into the lively gay sexuality of San Francisco in the 1960s and ’70s. He then seems to have become celibate until meeting his life partner Billy in 2008, completely skipping over the AIDS health crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. This spotty anecdotal approach makes this more of a selection of memoirs than an autobiography, although it does reveal a lot about how his thinking develops and how it affected his approach to psychology and neurology.

Sacks describes himself as a storyteller, a trait he says he picked up from his mother. Storytelling is the style he adopted for his professional writing, describing case histories of his patients rather than abstracting their stories to symptoms and outcomes. This in part may explain why his books have met resistance among other neurologists but have also been so popular among general readers. In seeing his patients as people with life stories, rather than as the abstractions common in conventional medical writing, he understands them more deeply than other researchers might. It appears that he takes his patients’ histories and ponders them extensively as he attempts to describe them, sometimes taking months to write each one. With this approach, it’s understandable that his patients grow deeply attached to him and many become long-time friends. It’s probably not possible to say that this is a better approach than the conventional one, but certainly it seems invaluable to have some researchers taking an in-depth holistic view while others take the focused examination.

Fascinatingly, later in his life, Sacks comes to the conclusion that perception, experience and consciousness are constructed phenomena, formed by each individual in a way similar to the way that learning and memory are individually constructed. Paraphrasing Gerald Edelman, he says “As we move about, our sense organs take samplings of the world, and from these, maps are created in the brain. There then occurs with experience a selective strengthening of those mappings that corresponds to successful perceptions – successful in that they prove the most useful and powerful for the building of ‘reality.’ ” This of course implies that each individual builds a unique picture of reality and a unique consciousness, although presumably with a coherence among other people with “successful” mappings. This radical understanding comes late in Sacks’ life, so he does not have time in this book to talk about its implications.

In a way, this book is a bit of a teaser leading a reader into Sacks’ other books. He touches on many of them in a tantalizing way without going into what he has already developed at book length. But he makes them so intriguing, and his storytelling is so engaging, that this book makes me want to pick up the others and find out what more he has to say.