BBC
Future
19 June 2012

What hallucination reveals about our minds

About the author

Since Awakenings first stormed the bestseller lists (and the silver screen), Oliver Sacks has become an unlikely household name, single-handedly inventing the genre of neurological anthropology. Oliver Sacks is a ground-breaking neurologist - and a gifted storyteller, who has enriched our knowledge of the infinite variations of human psychology. After his pioneering work with “sleepy sickness” patients (who were in fact survivors of an early-20th-century pandemic), Sacks went on to study the connections between music and the brain, as well as disorders such as Tourette's syndrome, Parkinson's disease, and many other little-understood disorders that often count Sacks as one of their first chroniclers.

Sacks is well known as a writer of such best-selling case histories as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and his memoir of his early work, Awakenings, all of which have breathed new life into the dusty 19th-century tradition of the clinical anecdote. Sacks' writing, compassion, and wide-ranging knowledge catapults the genre into the 21st century and brings the far frontiers of neurological experience into the view of millions of readers worldwide. He maintains a small practice in New York City.

Oliver Sacks at TED (Copyright: TED)

(Copyright: TED)

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnet syndrome – when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon.

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