Top 3 Oliver Sacks Books

When a scientist's books on his science become a kind of informative bestsellersUndoubtedly it is because we are faced with a writer interested in pouring out his knowledge for anyone who wants to unravel, even the first clues or their most obvious reflections, interesting realities of his knowledge. And one of those scientists determined to reveal the appeal of his wisdom was the illustrious Englishman Oliver sacks.

La neuroscience, the one that brightened her first days curiously from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, finds in Sacks an illustrious thinker whose concerns transcend teaching or research fields to propose new scenarios in any field.

The neurological makes up a universe not yet fully known. And between its lights and shadows Sacks found that literary aspect that as soon as it enters us into specific pathologies or relevant studies as it unfolds on field investigations that connect with the anthropological.

Like almost any great creator who intends to write with full knowledge of the facts, Sacks made his own neurological conditions and even his emotional limitations that spring on which to build momentum to give his life to research. Its praxis, to call it somehow, sometimes aroused the misgivings of the scientific community.

The result more of a corporatism determined to preserve knowledge and adhere to established procedures than in the experimental concern typical of a field like this.

On some occasion I spoke of the curious relationship between medicine and literature. A relationship in which we find authors as diverse as Chekhov, Pio Baroja, Robin cook, Connan doyle o Hosseini. In the case of Oliver Sacks, literature becomes science and science is written with a vocation for literature.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Oliver Sacks

Awakenings

My approach to this scientist was due to an old movie of the same name scripted from this book. A book that came into my hands many years later, when I barely remembered the movie and the issue once again raised in my mind the avant-garde nature of a guy whose experiments we have rarely heard about again.

Because Sacks, back in 1969, brought back to life some catatonic patients left for impossible by official science. Not everything was a resounding success in the experiment with a new drug. But going from a state of total nullification to recovering sensations of life in which neural stimuli work again was a shock for everyone.

Even more so if we consider that these patients had been living for more than twenty years due to an encephalitis epidemic. An intense book to start with this groundbreaking scientist.

Awakenings

The man who mistook his wife for a hat

As a title, this work provides that tragicomic notion that it intends. Without a doubt out of curiosity, she invites you to read it. What comes next maintains that tone of a certain detachment from the technical, that informative intention parallel to the development of the thesis that any research book always provides. A total of twenty patients with their comings, their comings or their absolute losses from the reference of our world.

Sometimes it seems as if Sacks wants to unveil a strange balance between distortion of reality and extraordinary abilities.

If not for his avowed atheism, it seems as if Sacks is pointing to a God between comic and vengeful who grants the gift and fixes the imbalance, all in a brain where neurons write the particular world that they have scripted from DNA.

The aberration of the illnesses suffered by the twenty protagonists present us with a chilling panorama of our most powerful weapon, a brain in whose magical procedure both fascinating secrets and maddening convictions are hidden.

Moving. A life

I was in doubt as to whether to put the book in third place Hallucinations or this, the biography of the eccentric type scientific fact and staunch promoter of the knowledge of science.

And of course, knowing the genius always weighs. And it is true that in this book we know well the motivations of a writer that are linked to a necessarily restless spirit, faced with his own fears about sexuality, the madness seen from his brother's schizophrenia, his most profound and dramatic experiences. , from his contact with some drugs as an experimental route.

An amalgam of unique experiences in whose overcoming we find all the answers for that perspective of the man of science freed from taboos, procedures and closed formulas, even more so in a field as extensive as neurology.

While other illustrious doctors, politicians or athletes can write those soporific biographies with the epic that took them there as a coaching method, Sacks once left his soul to offer us precisely that, his soul.

On the move: A life
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