Awakenings
This is the extraordinary account of a group of 20 patients, survivors of the great sleeping-sickness epidemic which swept the world in the 1920s, and the astonishing, explosive "awakening" effect they experienced 40 years later through a new drug L-DOPA administered by Dr Sacks. The stories he tells of these remarkable individuals are moving, often courageous and sometimes tragic. Through them he also explores the most general questions of health, disease, suffering, care and the human condition.
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What Hacker News says
- People don't give proprioception enough credit until they end up losing it. Proprioception is the sense of where in the world our bodies are.
I hold the belief that proprioception is more than a sense, but rather, part of what makes us conscious as it requires a sense of 'I'. Toddlers are able to identify themselves in mirrors, and it is usually preceded by movements, and identifying that "the mirrored human performs the same movements as I do", which requires some form of proprioception.
Oliver Sacks talks a lot about other senses beyond those covered in school. I can recommend "The man who mistook his wife for a hat", "Hallucinations", and "Awakenings".
- The book (Awakenings by Oliver Sacks) might be a better resource if you're interested in specifics and don't care for dramatization.
- Also, if you want to learn more about Oliver Sacks outside of his weightlifting, check out Awakenings (his book, later made into a movie starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams, with the latter playing Sacks) or The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He wrote a number of other books that are also interesting - exploring the way the brain works by understanding when it fails - but those two are probably the best known.
- I'm reading Awakenings by Oliver Sacks in English and Medmänniskor by Stefan Einhorn in Swedish.
- If it was Oliver Sacks' Awakenings then it is non-fiction, though it did get turned into a movie.
- Reading the HN title, I was immediately reminded of the Oliver Sacks book Awakenings[1]. He discovered that the drug L-DOPA could temporarily awaken encephalitis patients from a coma-like state. I wonder if the article's title "Awakening after a sleeping pill" is a reference to that book.
