Psychology is, at its simplest, easily defined as the scientific study of the human mind, behavior, and experience. When reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, one cannot help but see the stories presented by Dr. Oliver Sacks, a clinical neurologist, are just as much psychological in nature as they are neurological. Sacks claims to be “equally interested in diseases and people” (p. vii) and seeks to share with the reader the “suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject” (p. viii). It is this identification with the person behind the disease that makes Sacks’ book meaningful from a psychological point of view. One could say Sacks is a physiological psychologist, concerned as he is with how the person, or mind, …show more content…
After rapidly and unexpectedly losing all ability to know where her limbs were without looking at them as well as her ability to speak, the woman spent a year in rehab learning how to control her vocal cords and to move on her own again. Sacks’ patient had lost her ability to perceive her body position, and despite her rehabilitation, she never regained that sense. Without using her eyes to see where her limbs were at any given moment, the woman would crumple into a heap like a lifeless doll. Although her body, like all others, has body-position sensors in her muscles, on her tendons, and in her joints (Kasschau, 1985, p, 205), the woman’s brain had either ceased to receive or ceased to interpret the signals sent from the sensors. Sacks not only helped to treat the woman’s physiological symptoms, but helped her to deal with the emotional aspect of her recovery, much as a clinical psychologist would. She was able to express her feelings about her struggle to recover, and Sacks took those feelings seriously enough to include in his tale. The woman’s case is an interesting one that merits further study by a physiological psychologist, but Sacks’ initial study opened that door to the …show more content…
Most appear to suffer from a form of receptive aphasia, in which they cannot understand the spoken word, but still manage to follow the meanings of the speaker through their interpretation of paralanguage and kinesics. Through just these forms of nonverbal communication, the patients in the tale were able to follow the president’s speech on television well enough to ken his disingenuousness. This is not surprising when Kasschau (1985) points out that up to 93% of the feeling behind a message may be communicated nonverbally (p. 322). Similarly, nearly 100 years earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche posited, “One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth” (as cited in Sacks, 1998, p. 82). Still others in the tale have tonal aphasia; they can understand the words spoken by others, but fail to pick up on any paralanguage. Even though they failed to perceive the president’s tone in the tale, they still managed to pick up on his deception by carefully studying his kinesics. The aphasiacs are a perfect study for the psycholinguist in Sacks as he watches how they make the most of their disease without letting it hold them
Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple are all four topics in the book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales,” by Oliver Sacks. You might not understand what those mean or discuss until you realize who Oliver Sacks is. Oliver Sacks is a Neurologist who has had the chance to take upon these twenty-four case studies and share them in a book. The book is more focused on neurological functions, different forms of the mind, and hallucinations/visions. All of these are related to the first few chapters in our Psychology textbook (Chapters 2,3,6,8,10). Oliver Sacks gives us clear insight into the mind of those that perceive things much differently than most. It is a clear insight to what most of us are curious about but may not fully understand.
For example, “The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them… I heard many things in the heaven…Earth… I heard many things in Hell (pg.522). The Narrator has stated to have a disease that has affected his perception of reality. Furthermore, The Narrator seems to have skewed morals. For example on page 523, “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me … for his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!” The Narrator had planned to kill The Old Man simply because he was not fond of his eye. He was so easily swayed to kill because he thought The Old Man’s Eye had cursed him. This man acts on impulse and has no
Scientists are on the brink of doing the unthinkable-replenishing the brains of people who have suffered strokes or head injuries to make them whole again. If that is not astonishing enough, they think they may be able to reverse paralysis. The door is at last open to lifting the terrifying sentence these disorders still decree-loss of physical function, cognitive skills, memory, and personality.
...acters who cannot speak their minds to communicate nonverbally, such as with Cash’s audible response to Darl’s silent thought (AILD 144) and Darl and Dewey Dell’s unspoken conversation about Addie’s imminent death (AILD 27) in As I Lay Dying. However, even then there is uncertainty, and the stream-of-consciousness style of parts of that novel and The Sound and the Fury reflect Faulkner’s fixation on the process of developing words and explanation. In “Spotted Horses,” the men characters watch Eck as he is motionless: “Watching him, they could almost see him visibly gathering and arranging words, speech” (PF 339). This is what Faulkner and his characters do throughout his works: personify the human need to organize the mind to gather and arrange words—a goal that cannot be achieved perfectly; however, to Faulkner, it can be approached and therefore must be attempted.
Sacks, O. W. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. New York: Summit Books.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Written By: Dr. Oliver Sacks. Although the title suggests a comical book, Oliver Sacks presents an entirely different look at the mentally challenged/disturbed. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a book that explains why a patient shows signs of loss, excesses, transport, and simplicity. Coincidentally, the book opens with its titling story, letting the reader explore the mind of an accomplished doctor who seems to have lost his true sight of life.
In the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, chapter 3, The Disembodied Lady. Is about a woman named Christina who is twenty-seven years old, who found out to have gallstones, and removal of her gallbladder. She was admitted to the hospital and was placed on antibiotic for microbial prophylaxis. Before her surgery, Christina was feeling symptoms of Anxiety hysteria, which is the feeling of uncertainty and bewilderment. The day before her surgery hey symptoms were getting worse. She found standing impossible to do and could hold nothing in her hand even if she wants to. When she went to get tested for her symptoms and the doctors thought it was a type of hysteria and labels it as a biparietal syndrome. Christina had lost
Introduction Franz Kappus, a 19-year old student, wanted to solicit a career advice and a literary critique for the poems he had written (“Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet” 1). Kappus solicited the advice and critique of Rainer Maria Rilke, a pioneer Austrian poet (“Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet” 1). Rilke wrote ten letters in order to provide assistance to the needs of Kappus. These letters were in Rilke’s work, entitled, “Letters to a Young Poet. ” There are numerous advantages and complication in the humanistic approaches to the study of psychology.
Oliver Sacks shares his clinical stories of fascinating neurological disorders in his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. The book contains 24 case studies in which Dr Sacks introduces readers to the lives of several individuals he was working with at the Institute of Defectology. Sacks informs readers of cases involving brain deficiency, memory loss and vivid imaginations which are shared in four parts of the book including Losses, Excesses, Transports and The World of The Simple. In The World of The Simple, readers are introduced to the cognitively impaired. This book review will share a review of the cases presented by Sacks in the world of the simple with an in-depth view of the autist artist.
The study of psychology began as a theoretical subject a branch of ancient philosophy, and later as a part of biological sciences and physiology. However, over the years, it has grown into a rigorous science and a separate discipline, with its own sets of guidance and experimental techniques. This paper aims to study the various stages that the science of psychology passed through to reach its contemporary status, and their effects on its development. It begins with an overview of the historical and philosophical basis of psychology, discusses the development of the various schools of thought, and highlights their effects on contemporary personal and professional decision-making.
In this section, the reader is introduced to a woman, Christina, whose nightmare of losing control of her limbs and losing her fine and gross motor skills was realized. One portion mentions that her hands roamed and she was seemingly unaware of this happening. This stuck out to me because it seems a lot like an aspect of an episode of dissociation. Because of past events in my life, I experience dissociation in various forms relatively frequently, so I felt drawn to this story. Based on knowledge of neuroscience from that portion of the course, I would assume that the Basal Ganglia was affected in some way, causing the movement to be stunted. Additionally, from this part of the class, we learned that acetylcholine enables muscle action and that dopamine influences movement, so I feel that it is possible that these neurotransmitters played a part in Christina’s difficulties. She also expresses in the chapter that her body does not feel like her own- a concept similar to that of depersonalization, though much more extreme and permanent in her case. We learn that she accomplished no recovery neurologically, but rather had to relearn how she could recreate actions that she had learned how to do long ago. Structure of the brain should alter in order to facilitate function, but in her case, carrying out tasks never got easier. Although she was constantly positively reinforced
...tation test where a person were to read the story without the knowledge that the real author is also the narrator and a character, it would probably be read as a detailed work of fiction. Because readers have the knowledge that Oliver Sacks is in fact a neurologist, it changes the meanings in the text. This is how the real author is distinct from the implied author; the implied author is what the reader can deduce from the material presented in the text, without any knowledge of the real author’s context. The knowledge that Oliver Sacks is in reality a neurologist also positions readers to accept the narrator’s version of events because they would be inclined to accept the privileged and authoritative narrative voice. The techniques of point of view, subjective narration and characterisation therefore position readers to accept the meanings presented in the text.
The psychological genre as it relates to sociological and medicinal matters has gained an increasing amount of scientific approval. Impartiality and the scientific method are both integral components to a psychologist’s mode of practice. However, even the most esteemed of psychologists can only speculate at what makes human beings act the way they do. Absolutes play no function in psychology. Everything is relative and open to conjecture. Theologians give us their visions or thoughts about life. In the field of psychology, there have been many different regions of interest and speculation.
The British Psychological Society states that ‘Psychology is the scientific study of people, the mind and behaviour’ (BPS). In this essay I will be discussing what is actually meant by this and whether psychology fits into both the traditional views of a science, as well as more contemporary perspectives. It is widely suggested that Psychology is a “coalition of specialities” meaning it is multi-disciplinary (Hewstone, Fincham and Foster 2005, page 4). I will therefore examine whether it could be considered wrong to think that all parts of the discipline should neatly fit into one view of a scientific approach.
Before long, however, he faced patients whose disorders made no neurological sense. For example, a patient may have lost all feeling in one of their hands, but there is no sensory nerve that would numb their entire hand and nothing else when damaged. Freud’s search for a cause for such disorders set his mind running in a direction destined to change human self-understanding. He believed that some neurological disorders could have psychological causes. By observing patients with these disorders, Freud was led to his discovery of the unconscious (Myers & Dewall, pg# 573, 2015). Furthermore, he theorized that the lost feeling in the individual’s hand might have been caused by a fear of touching their