Response to The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
Joseph Petrini
802
ELA
Over the summer I read the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks. the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat is about cases of people with psychological problems. Many cases are of people having slight tweaks in their brain that cause them to see things wrong or have extreme memory loss. Reading this book made me realize how everything I do and see and feel and touch ect. has to do with connections in my brain being made and how fragile and important those connections are.
One thing that proved this to me was a story about a man who was suffering from PTSD from WW II. This made his memory very short term. In the story Oliver Sacks leaves the room to get something, comes back and the patient doesn't remember who Oliver Sacks is. This showed me about how important and functional memories are.
Another thing that made me think about the vulnerability of the human brain was a story about a woman with Cerebral Palsies. Cerebral Palsies is a condition that impairs muscle coordination She comes in complaining about how her hands are useless mounds of flesh. Oliver Sacks tries and succeeds to teach her something that most humans learn in the first months of their life, the ability to recognize shapes by feeling them. This showed me how malleable the human brain is and how instinctive the ability to adapt is even post-pubic.
The book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks is a book that really taught me about the ever-changing neurological output in our lives. It taught me this lesson through collected stories about patients of Oliver Sacks.
