Oliver Sacks
Neurologist, Author
Oliver Sacks, a physician and author, has been called “the poet laureate of medicine” by The New York Times. His books and essays, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat andAn Anthropologist on Mars, are used in schools and universities around the world. He is also the author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and a forthcoming book, The Mind’s Eye.
In his books, Dr. Sacks describes patients struggling to live with brain conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, Parkinsonism, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. His book Awakenings inspired a play by Harold Pinter and also the Oscar-nominated feature film with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. His essays regularly appear in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals.
Dr. Sacks is professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and the university’s first Columbia University Artist.
Past Events
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Strangers in the Mirror
Sacks and photorealist painter Chuck Close—geniuses from opposite ends of the creative spectrum—share their experiences of living with a curious condition known as “face blindness,” or prosopagnosia
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Time the Familiar Stranger Mysteries of Mind and Time
Oliver Sacks and psychologist Daniel Gilbert draw on converging insights from physical, biological and neurological perspectives to reflect on this most vital factor shaping the human experience.
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Music and the Brain
The Abyssinian Gospel Choir joined neurologist/author Oliver Sacks in an exploration of the power of music, as the choir’s performance provides a stimulating context for accounts of music’s biological foundations, and of patients whose lives were altered by the empowerment of music.
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The Mind’s Eye
Oliver Sacks and Robert Krulwich shed light on the interplay between what the eye sees and how the mind perceives it.
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