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The Man Who Mistook His Wife F

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
As a child, I watched Alfred Hitchcock Theater, The Twilight Zone and other science fiction or horror shows. Often times the storyline was based on a victim’s mental problems or their skewed perception of the world. Looking back, I remember the fascination I felt when watching one specific episode of the Twillight Zone. In this particular episode, a man turned into a zombie by some type of poison. Essentially he was still alive, but he was dead to the world. In the end he was embalmed while he was completely conscious yet could not say anything to prevent it. Like this incident, every episode captivated me but when it was over I could sleep easy because there was no possibility of any of it happening. Oliver Sacks disrupts my childhood understanding of what is plausible and what is not in the real world. In his Book, The Man Who mistook his Wife for a Hat, Sacks compiles a group of stories that appeal to the curiosity and compassion of a young boy through his close look at human experiences in the eyes of science, medicine and new technology.
The chapters discussing “Losses” and “Transports” sparked my interest the most. The first story that caught my attention was about the sixty year old Madeline J. who was suffers from being “congenitally blind” and has “cerebral palsy”(Sack 59). She was a very bright and intelligent woman that gained all her knowledge and learning from listening to books and from talking to people. She had never learned Braille because her hands were “Useless godforsaken lumps of dough…” Through simple tests, Sacks discovered that her hand recognized light touches, pain, and temperature. All basic sensations and perceptions were in tact. However, when objects were placed in her hands, she could not identify them. She did not try to search and explore the object; “there were no active ‘interogatory’...