This book is a difficult read in my opinion. I know that all of the medical terminology is completely over my head. I felt like I spent much of the time at Dictionary.com. On the other hand I found the book quite fascinating and for lack of a better word “deep”. Sack writes about things that I never put much thought into before. I never thought about all of the functions of my body and mind and how they could relate to how I function on a daily basis. What if I became spiritually disconnected from my body? I could only imagine it being like the feeling that I get when a hand or a foot “falls asleep”. This “asleep” feeling would possess my entire body and would never wake up. I know that I was most touched by the story about the disembodied woman. I could not help trying to imagine what it would be like to live as she did unable to physically feel. What if I could never feel the touch of another human being? What would that do to my life as I know it?
Sacks writes about what normal people take for granted and about what he says about a person’s experience. Are we what we have experienced? I believe this is true. I believe that what we have experienced and what we hold in our memories will dictate how we will behave in our lives. If we do not remember our experiences are we not who we really are? (It begs the question). In my opinion, if we lose our experiences then we are like a child who is never capable of reaching adulthood. When I was reading Opincar, he wrote, “A child’s sadness is so large because he has nothing with which to compare it (142).” This could explain why teenagers are so dramatic and also why patients who have amnesia are indifferent to what they cannot remember.
I really like how Sacks quotes modern philosophers like Hume and Nietzsche. I believe that it does show what type of person that he is by which quotes he chooses to relate in his writings. I cannot imagine knowing a person much less a medical doctor like him. His bedside manner is philosophical and he is far from egocentric because he allows his patients to think and wants them to understand about their illness rather than simply writing a prescription.