Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Brain Game

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

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Officially I did not finish The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks. This is not because it was bad, but because it was not what I was exactly looking for. While it was technical in nature, the non-technical reader could partake in it without a lot of issues. However, I will admit, there were places where I read every single word of the sentence, knew exactly what each one meant, but still had no idea what […]

The brain can go wrong in some crazy ways

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

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CBR15 BINGO: Strange Worlds, because these essays take you into the very strange world of the mind BINGO: Strange Worlds, Queer Lives, You Are Here, Asia & Oceania, Picture This When I studied abnormal psychology in college, my favorite parts of the textbook were those little side-blurbs that described specific cases of people afflicted with weird brain conditions. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat reads a lot like those side blurbs. In this book, neurologist Oliver Sacks (of Awakenings fame), describes 24 […]

River of words where I couldn’t catch the wave

River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks was a well-known neurologist best known for his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The River of Consciousness is a posthumously published collection of essays (many previously published) all roughly related to consciousness. I say roughly as they span topics ranging from the mental lives of plants and worms to Freud’s early career flirting with neurology to the fallible nature of our memories. I had high expectations for this, my first Oliver Sacks read.  Sadly, those expectations did not […]

It’s like bad pizza…

The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks

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…Even when Oliver Sacks is bad, he’s still not that bad.  And this isn’t bad, it’s just my least favorite of his books. As Sacks himself allows, this is more like two books sandwiched together, and they both suffer for length. I may be biased as I work for a pediatric ophthalmologist, but I was really excited for the first half, with the titular island where a disproportionate percentage of residents have achromatopsia, or complete colorblindness, along with the associated low vision, photophobia, and nystagmus. […]

This is your brain on music

Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

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CBR12 BINGO: Music BINGO: Red, How-To, UnCannon, Roaring 20s, Music A 42-year old orthopedic surgeon is hit by lightning and suddenly develops an insatiable passion for piano music. An elderly man with semantic amnesia bursts into song at the slightest provocation. An elderly woman has lived her life unable to “hear” music, which manifests itself to her mind as an intolerable cacophony. These are just a handful of the real individuals we meet in Musicopophilia, Oliver Sacks’s exploration of the interactions between music and the […]

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

Brainstorm by Suzanne O'Sullivan

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I’ve made reference to this phenomenon several times, but there are artists and art I love so much I’ll love knockoff versions of their work too. As a Radiohead fan, I’ll listen to their non-union UK equivalents on the regular (looking your way, Coldplay and Travis). I’ve never met an iteration of Groundhog Day I didn’t love; guess which episode of Supernatural was my favorite. I really liked Brian Azzarello’s run on Wonder Woman even if he owes Neil Gaiman royalties for that style. And […]



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