By LeRoy Lawson
Awakenings (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [originally published in 1973]).
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Touchstone, 1998).
Seeing Voices (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
I first met Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book of essays, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Who could resist such a title? Especially a lover of Dr. Seuss”s The Cat in the Hat. You don”t turn to Dr. Sacks to learn about either cats or hats, but you can discover much about brains gone askew””and that subject is as captivating, if not as entertaining, as anything by Dr. Seuss. (The mistaken man in the title, by the way, is a victim of “visual agnosia” and not a fellow absent-minded professor.)
Some time later I sat enthralled through the movie Awakenings, which led me immediately to buy and read Dr. Sacks”s book, the inspiration for the film. Robin Williams portrays Sacks, whom he somewhat resembles (well, they are both short). It features encephalitis victims in the Bronx”s Beth Abraham Hospital. Treating them with massive doses of the new miracle drug L-Dopa, Dr. Sacks temporarily liberates them from their vegetative states. It was like watching resurrections on screen. For awhile.
The actor Robert DeNiro has never surpassed his portrayal of Leonard Lowe, whom we follow from his paralysis through his exuberant embrace of new life to his crushing retreat into his disease. This is a movie you can never forget.
In other books and articles, the neurologist clinically describes patients victimized by Tourette”s syndrome, Parkinson”s disease, autism, color blindness, dementia, amnesia, schizophrenia, and other brain aberrations. In Seeing Voices, one of my favorites, he sympathetically traces the development of our society”s growing acceptance of the deaf culture in general and of signing (as opposed to lipreading) in particular.
LOVE OF MUSIC
His most recent book (and my most recent opportunity to hear from this wise and compassionate physician) is Musicophilia. Don”t be put off by the title. Yes, it is technical, but it simply means “love of music.”
Sacks takes us music lovers on an exploratory trip through the brain where we discover, surprisingly, that the music which is the source of such pleasure and even therapy for us can, for others, be torture. He believes our responsiveness to music is inbuilt, a must-have””except when for some physiological reason we cannot appropriately hear and respond to it. Then it”s a must-not-have. (Mrs. Koch, my childhood piano teacher, had no idea what power she was unleashing when she taught me my scales.)
Sacks”s books introduce us to people young and old who dwell on the borders of human society. Whether their problem is Alzheimer”s, Parkinson”s, schizophrenia, epilepsy, musical hallucinations, or one of the other malfunctions of the brain, they are deprived of full social intercourse. Some of his subjects were born that way, like the congenitally deaf or mentally handicapped. Others have been traumatized; all have been in some way isolated.
To speak of their isolation is to raise again the question of language. For example, how do the deaf communicate? And is their sign language a real language? How does the brain facilitate communication? Is it hard-wired for language acquisition? And for music appreciation? As you follow this explorer through his several books, you realize that it isn”t in music or deafness or Parkinson”s or epilepsy or other aberrations that he”s primarily interested. It”s the brain itself.
MORE THAN A LUMP
What draws me to his writing, though, is his conviction that the brain is more than that lump of tissue floating in formaldehyde in high school biology labs everywhere. Not that the good doctor has not done his research. He holds his own in the naming of parts: the cerebellum, the abdygallum, the ganglia, the cerebrum. But the brain is not for him a mere collection of neurons and synapses and electrical charges. It is the engine of communication, the medium of interpretation, the miraculous instrument enabling humans to be human.
When he wrote Awakenings, his focus (and that of the subsequent movie) was on the dramatic effects of L-Dopa. (One reason I was so moved by the film was that, in the late 1960s, I saw L-Dopa”s positive effects on a member of our church. While her Parkinson”s was not cured, through this medicine she experienced unprecedented relief.)
Dr. Sacks also saw in those patients the magic of music to liberate. Somehow music gave them a way out of their paralysis; they could sing, dance, connect. Music provided the structure, the tempo. They were like my wife”s stepmother. When she could no longer build a coherent sentence, she could join us in a hymn sing, often taking the lead. When the music was over, though, the fog returned.
UNDERSTANDING AND RELIEF
Sacks calls himself an old Jewish atheist. I don”t read him for theological inspiration. Yet he intrigues me. I am impressed by his lifelong devotion to people who are misunderstood and shut out because they can”t keep up with the rest of us. I”m moved by his open acceptance of the peculiar and his determination to bring understanding and relief to the suffering.
I also, in his newest book, resonate with his grasp of the almost mystical power of music, its ability to lift us to realms above language and reach down into emotional depths we are helpless to express without it. Perhaps this is why, even though we have difficulty explaining our ineffable God, we can worship him in a musical language that does the speaking for us.
LeRoy Lawson, international consultant with Christian Missionary Fellowship International, is a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and a member of Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee. His column appears at least monthly.
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