Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks (2012)

[major_clanger]

I've recently re-read (or rather, listened to via audiobook having read it long ago) The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and having been reminded how much I enjoyed Sacks' writing I sought out Hallucinations, the most recent and as it happened the last of his books on aspects of neurology.

Some of the material will be familiar to readers of Sacks' previous books, as many of the neurological case studies he has previously discussed included hallucinations as one of their symptoms. But most of the cases he discussed were new to me, and even those previously referred to in other books were shown from a fresh perspective, as illustrations of one of the many types of hallucinatory experience.

Most people will think of hallucination in terms of visual experiences, and indeed Sacks discusses those, both those induced by brain injury or drugs and those, such as Charles Bonnet syndrome caused by loss of sight. Auditory hallucinations are not 'hearing voices', which tends to be a symptom of psychiatric rather than neurological problems, but as in several of the cases Sacks relates often involve music. Finally, tactile hallucination are most commonly experienced as phantom limbs; I'd assumed these were a universally negative phenomena, but Sacks indicates that some degree of phantom limb awareness is important for successful use of a prosthesis.

Something that surprised me, given the impression of Sacks' persona from his earlier books, was his frank discussion of his quite spectacularly varied and extensive use of mind-altering substances during his neurology residency at UCLA. I rather got the impression that he ended up scaring himself quite badly in the process, and can't help wondering what a fitness-to-practise panel would make of a trainee doctor experimenting on himself in quite such a fashion today. He seems to have drawn a sudden line under such a lifestyle though and if nothing else it gave a source of personal anecdotes. (I understand that Sacks eventually revealed that one of the case studies in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, that of Steven D, the medical student whose drug use led to radical changes in his sense of smell, was in fact about himself.)

I've had very few hallucinatory experiences and even the migraine-like headaches I get every year or two are devoid of the visual phenomena usually associated with such events (which is why I'm not even really sure they're migraines). I've had a few instances of sleep paralysis, although usually without any accompanying hallucinations apart from one horribly memorable instance of Night Hag syndrome, which is every bit as terrifying as Sacks describes. What I was slightly disappointed Sacks didn't discuss, although I can see it would be a distinct and probably non-neurological issue, is the kind of 'negative hallucinations' I suffer from in my OCD - an inability to convince oneself that something you can observe and indeed are concentrating on, such as locking a door, is actually real.

Hallucinations is very much recommended for anyone who enjoyed Sacks' other books, and indeed would be a good introduction to his style of writing for someone new to him. For myself, I think I'll get his recent autobiography - which I think was in the end his last book - and add the film version of Awakenings to our to-watch list.

Comments

[watervole]

I think I remember watching 'Awakenings'. Heartbreaking.

[uitlander]

During the week of "mystery illness" some years ago when I ran an extremely high temperature for 6 or so days the most annoying feature I can recall was the auditory hallucinations. This manifested as an orchestra mainly playing snatches of Fingal's Cave at me, which drove me nuts.