In Praise of Mind-Explorer Oliver Sacks

By: John Horgan

Posted: 11/21/08

One of the joys of being a science journalist is finding scientists who trash their own fields. Take Howard Gardner, a high-profile professor of psychology at Harvard. When I interviewed him a decade ago, he was so disgusted with psychology that he had quit the American Psychological Association. Psychology was not a true science, Gardner complained, and it probably never would be. Psychological research had provided no real understanding of such key concepts as the self, free will and personality. The only way psychology could advance, Gardner suggested, was to adopt a more "literary" style of investigation and discourse, like that practiced by the pioneering mind-explorers William James and Sigmund Freud.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks exemplifies this literary approach to the mind. Sacks is one of my favorite writers of any kind, fiction or nonfiction. His many best-sellers include case histories of patients with neurological syndromes, notably The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars and Awakenings (made into a film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro), Uncle Tungsten, a memoir about his childhood fascination with chemistry, and his most recent book, Musicophilia, an exploration of the neural underpinnings of music. A professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University and the first Columbia University Artist, Sacks will be speaking here at Stevens on Wednesday, December 3, at 4 p.m., in the Babbio Center, in an event sponsored by the Center for Science Writings and the College of Arts & Letters.
Sacks is best known for his vivid case studies of people afflicted by autism, strokes, tumors, Tourette's and other conditions. He resembles a Victorian explorer of uncharted territory astonished, entranced, by the curiosities he encounters. What saves Sacks from being a mere voyeur, ogling others' pathologies, is his compassion and empathy. While most mind-scientists try to work around the irreducibility of individual humans, Sacks has made it the centerpiece of his work. The poet William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey native, once proclaimed, "No ideas but in things" (a precept he violated in stating it). Sacks's philosophy might be described as "no ideas but in people." He once told me that he tried to follow the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's precept that a book should consist of "examples" rather than generalizations. He elaborated, "People keep saying, 'Sacks, where's your general theory?' But I'm rather content to multiply case histories and leave the theorizing to others."
Sacks's anti-reductionist credo is implicit in all his writings, but occasionally he makes it explicit. He once wrote, "To restore the human subject at the center-the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject-we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a 'who' as well as a 'what,' a real person, a patient, in relation to disease-in relation to the physical." Elsewhere he commented, "The realities of patients, the ways in which they and their brains construct their own worlds, cannot be comprehended wholly from observation of behavior, from the outside. In addition to the objective approach of the scientist, the naturalist, we must employ an intersubjective approach, too."
My good friend Susan Schept, who teaches psychology here at Stevens, will probably whack me over the head for saying this. But I agree with Howard Gardner that psychology is not really a science-certainly not in the same sense as chemistry, nuclear physics, molecular biology. The human mind resists conventional scientific analysis and reduction, and with good reason, because it is by far the most complicated object science has ever confronted. But with the help of wise, eloquent, imaginative mind-explorers such as Oliver Sacks, we can gain-if not self-knowledge-than at least a deeper appreciation of our endlessly odd selves.
[John Horgan is Director of the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the Stevens College of Arts & Letters. To learn more about the CSW, visit our website, www.stevens.edu/csw.]