All language subtitles for American Masters - Oliver Sacks- His Own Life - Season 35 - PBS

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.

Multisyllabic 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
facedown 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 putdown.

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
inThe 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 multimillion-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.