Book club 101: discussion questions for Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

Readers participating in One Book Sacramento events surrounding Steve Lopez's The Soloist may also be interested in reading book club discussion questions for Oliver Sacks' account of unique neurological case studies that raise fascinating questions about wellness and illness, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Injured individuals in Sacks' books “can sometimes enjoy virtues and powers not found in the normal”. Sacks tells us “We are in strange waters here, where all the usual considerations may be reversed – where illness may be wellness, and normality illness, where excitement may be either bondage or release, and where reality may like inebriety, not sobriety.” Why might illness be more appealing than wellness or normality? What does one gain by being normal? What might one lose by being normal?
In Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, she cites a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem as expressive of her own delusional thinking in the year after her husband died: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." About victims in Nazi death camps, Viktor Frank said “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” What is the role of strange, delusional, magical thinking in the life of the everyday, uninjured person experiencing the predictable ups and downs of life?
What role does “narrative” or “story” play in leading a meaningful life? How do you see this in the cases of Jimmy or Rebecca?
Of one of his cases, Sacks says: “William’s great gift is also his damnation. If only he could be quiet, one feels, for an instant; if only he could stop the ceaseless chatter and jabber; if only he could relinquish the deceiving surface of illusions – then (ah then!) reality might seep in; something genuine, something deep, something true, something felt, could enter his soul.” What does this tell you about this particular case? What does it tell you about the rest of us?
What role does work play in leading a meaningful life? Why? How does this relate to someone like Nathaniel Ayers in The Soloist?
Sacks says of philosopher David Hume that he argues that “personal identity is a fiction – we do not exist, we are but a consecution of sensations, or perceptions.” How do you see the self? YOUR self? Are you a series of biologically related gestures that suggest a self, or do you have a self, separate from those measurable, separately governed gestures?
In Richard Powers’ novel The Echo Maker, he creates a central character modeled on Oliver Sacks, a character who is increasingly vilified by critics who believe that he may simplify and exploit medical cases for publication, tapping into our inherent interest in the strange and abnormal. Disability-rights advocate Tom Shakespeare labeled Sacks “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.” Do you find Sacks’ citing these case histories for the general public exploitative, unsavory, unscientific? Why or why not?
Others argue, like McGinn, that there is “a tacit ethical message in everything he writes; namely, that even in the midst of tremendous neurological upset there is still a human self throbbing within.” What do you make of this idea that the case studies in his book increase our awareness of the legitimate self living within the apparently mentally ill or impaired? Is this theme a relevant subject for literature?
Some critics suggest that recent remarkable improvements in science’s ability to map the brain make anecdotal brain research like Sacks does archaic, whereas Sacks argues that “these new insights of neuroscience are exciting beyond measure, but there is always a certain danger that the simple art of observation may be lost, that clinical description may become perfunctory, and the richness of human context ignored.” What do you think about the best that medicine offers? What qualities do you look for in medical caregivers and why?
In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s considers whether certain kinds of people are more likely to succeed at thin slicing, at making rapid-pace, instinctive decisions than others. Do any case studies in Sacks' book bear on this idea that instinctive thinking or action may at times be superior to logical, methodical thinking? What about the individuals in the hospital watching the Presidential debates? What about Jose the artist?