The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine’s ultimate responsibility: “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”
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What Hacker News says
- awesome to see a VS Ramachandran rec on HN. normally it's the rare secondary rec after someone mentions Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
- Even in the best of cases, our perceptions and interpretations of those perceptions are often dramatically flawed. Add on top of that neural atrophy, loss of oxygen, accumulation of senescent cells, poor clearance of waste products ... and what comes out is often going to be gibberish, as the remaining working parts of the mind attempts to construct a coherent narrative from the broken fragments of sensory input and failing memories.
I got interested in consciousness 35 years ago or so when I read Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat". Although the various people depicted in the stories had some physical deficit due to a trauma of some kind, it vividly demonstrated how we rationalize our way through the world more than we reason our way through it. Our conscious mind is much more of a facade than we typically imagine.
When people say, "Well, LLMs are just generating token N+1 from the previous N tokens, they really aren't thinking", I counter with this: we have been having this discussion -- are you at all aware of the stream of words coming out of your mouth, or are you hearing them the same time that I am?
Yes, sometimes we have deliberate thought where we rehearse different lines of reasoning before uttering something, but 98% of the time we are spewing just like LLMs do. And when we do engage in deliberate thought, each of those trial sentences again just appears without consideration; we are simply post-hoc picking the one that feels best.
- > Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat"
Amazing book. Made me entirely reconsider how I think about human behaviour and "how they got like they did".
Should be required reading for being a human living in a society.
- "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
- What are you actually arguing against here? The article is about a variety of different phenomenon, some of which can be interpreted as a neuronal "dictatorship" (e.g. escape actions) and some of which can't (e.g. monkey arm movement).
I don't think you can characterise something as complex as a mind with a simple argument by contradiction.
(by the way, you might be interested in Oliver Sack's popsci book "the man who mistook his wife for a hat". A lot of it is about temporal lobe injuries, which are well known to cause consciousness-related disorders)
- Have you read _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales_? That was what made me realise how disconnected sensation can be from reality.
