by Oliver Sacks
Steve said, “I can’t help it; I have Tourette’s syndrome.” He showed the manager an informational pamphlet from the TSA meeting, adding, “This is Tourette’s Syndrome Awareness Week—haven’t you heard?”
The manager said, “I don’t care; I’ve already called the police. Leave now, or you will be arrested.”
Steve returned to the hotel, outraged, and told us the story, and pretty soon there were two hundred Touretters marching on Wendy’s, ticcing and shouting, and I was in their midst. We had alerted the media, the Ohio press took up the story, and I suspect Wendy’s has never been the same. This is the only time in my life I have been involved in any sort of demonstration or march, apart from one other occasion, also in 1988.
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In March of 1988, quite unexpectedly, Bob Silvers called. “Have you heard about the revolution of the deaf?” he asked. There had been a revolt of the deaf students at Gallaudet, who were protesting the appointment of a hearing president for the university. They wanted a deaf president, a president who could communicate in fluent American Sign Language, and they had barricaded the campus, shutting the school down. I had been to Gallaudet a couple of times, Bob said—would I go back to Washington to cover the revolt? I agreed to go, and I invited Lowell to come and take photographs. I asked my friend Bob Johnson, a professor of linguistics at Gallaudet, to be our interpreter.
The Deaf President Now protest lasted more than a week, culminating in a march on the Capitol (Gallaudet was founded and maintained by a congressional charter). My role as impartial observer soon got compromised; I was walking along and making notes on the sidelines when one of the deaf students grabbed me by the arm and signed, “Come on, you’re with us.” So I joined the students—over two thousand of them—in their protest march. The essay I wrote about this for The New York Review of Books was the first “reporting” I had ever done.
Stan Holwitz at the University of California Press (which had published Migraine in the United States) suggested that my two essays on the deaf might make a nice book, and I liked the idea but felt I needed to write a few paragraphs as a sort of bridge between the two parts—something on general aspects of language and the nervous system. I had no inkling that these few paragraphs would in fact become the largest part of the book, which would eventually be called Seeing Voices.
—
A Leg to Stand On had got many nice reviews when it came out in England in May of 1984, but these had been eclipsed in my mind by a single highly critical one, by the poet James Fenton. His review upset me deeply and brought me to a depressive halt for three months.
But when the American edition came out later in the year, I was elated by a wonderful, generous review in The New York Review of Books, a review which so revived and energized and reassured me that it led to an explosion of writing—twelve pieces in a few weeks, completing The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
The review was by Jerome Bruner, who was a legendary figure, a founder of the cognitive revolution in psychology in the 1950s. At that time, behaviorism, as espoused by B. F. Skinner and others, was dominant; one looked only at stimulus and response—the visible, public manifestations of behavior. There was no reference to any inner process, to what might go on internally between stimulus and response. The concept of “mind” scarcely existed for Skinner, but this was exactly what Bruner and his colleagues set out to restore.
Bruner was a close friend of Luria’s, and they had many intellectual affinities. In his autobiography, In Search of Mind, Bruner described meeting Luria in Russia in the 1950s. He wrote, “Luria’s [view] on the role of language in early development was more than welcome to me. So were his other enthusiasms.”
Like Luria, Bruner insisted on observing children as they acquired language not in a lab setting but in their own environment. In Child’s Talk, he greatly enlarged and enriched our concepts of how language is acquired.
In the 1960s, following Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary work, there was a great emphasis on syntax in linguistics; Chomsky postulated that the brain had a built-in “language acquisition device.” This Chomskyan sense of a brain hardwired and poised to acquire language on its own seemed to ignore its social origins and its fundamental function as communication. Bruner argued that grammar could not be dissociated from meaning or communicative intent. In his view, the syntax, the semantics, and the pragmatics of language all went together.
It was Bruner’s work, above all, which allowed me to think about language not just in linguistic terms but in social ones as well, and this was crucial for my understanding of sign language and deaf culture.
Jerry has been a good friend and, at one level and another, a sort of guide and implicit mentor. There seem no limits to his curiosity and knowledge. He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say, “I no longer believe what I was about to say.”) At ninety-nine, his remarkable powers seem undiminished.
—
Although I had observed losses of language—various forms of aphasia—in my patients, I was very ignorant about the development of language in children. Darwin had portrayed the development of language and mind in his lovely “Biographical Sketch of an Infant” (the infant being his firstborn son), but I had no children of my own to observe, and none of us have any personal memory of that crucial period when language is acquired in the second or third year of life. I needed to find out more.
One of my closest friends at Einstein was Isabelle Rapin, a pediatric neurologist from Switzerland who was especially interested in the neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood. This was one of my own interests at the time; I had written a paper on “spongy degeneration” (Canavan’s sclerosis) in identical twins.
The neuropathology department organized brain cuttings once a week, and it was at one of these, soon after I started at Einstein, that I met Isabelle.6 We formed an unexpected pair—Isabelle, precise and rigorous in her thinking, and me, slovenly, slapdash, full of odd associations and mental detours—but we hit it off from the start, and we have remained very close friends.
Isabelle would never permit me, any more than she permitted herself, any loose, exaggerated, or uncorroborated statements. “Give me the evidence,” she always says. In this way, she is my scientific conscience, and she has saved me from many embarrassing blunders. But when she feels that I am on solid ground, she insists that I publish what I have observed plainly and clearly, so it can be properly seen and debated, and in this way she has been behind many of my books and articles.
I would often ride my motorbike up to Isabelle’s weekend house on the banks of the Hudson, and Isabelle, Harold, and their four children made me a part of their family. I would come up and spend the weekend talking with Isabelle and Harold, occasionally taking the children for a motorbike ride or a swim in the river. In the summer of 1977, I lived in their barn for a whole month, working on an obituary of Luria.7
A few years later, when I began thinking and reading about deafness and sign language, I spent an intense three-day weekend with Isabelle, and she spent many hours educating me about sign language and the special culture of the deaf, which she had observed over many years working with deaf children.
She drummed into me what Luria’s mentor, Vygotsky, had written:
If a blind or deaf child achieves the same level of development as a normal child, then the child with a defect achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means. And, for the pedagogue, it is particularly important to know the uniqueness of the course, along which he must lead the child. The key to originality transforms the minus of the handicap into the plus of compensation.
The monumental achievement of learning language is relatively straightforward—almost automatic—for hearing children but may be highly problematic for deaf children, especially if they are not exposed to a vis
ual language.
Deaf, signing parents will “babble” to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant’s brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up “speaking” sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community.
For many of the children I saw with Isabelle at a school for the deaf in the Bronx, learning lip-reading and spoken language had demanded a huge cognitive effort, a labor of many years; even then, their language comprehension and use was often far below normal. I saw how disastrous the cognitive and social effects of not achieving competent, fluent language could be (Isabelle had published a detailed study of this).
With my interest in perceptual systems in particular, I wondered what went on in the brain of a person born deaf, especially if his native language was a visual one. I learned that very recent studies had shown how, in the brains of congenitally deaf signers, what would normally be auditory cortex in a hearing person was “reallocated” for visual tasks and especially for the processing of a visual language. The deaf tend to be “hypervisual” compared with hearing people (this is evident even in the first year of life), but they become much more so with the acquisition of sign.
The traditional view of the cerebral cortex was that each part of it was pre-dedicated to particular sensory or other functions. The idea that parts of the cortex could be reallocated to other functions suggested that the cortex might be much more plastic, much less programmed, than formerly thought. It made clear, through the special case of the deaf, that an individual’s experience shapes the higher functions of his brain by selecting (and augmenting) the neural structures which underlie function.
This seemed to me of momentous importance, something which demanded a radically new vision of the brain.
1. I described the first time I did so in “The Possessed,” a chapter of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, though I disguised John P.’s identity by portraying him as an old woman.
2. Gilles de la Tourette’s patient in fact did not have Tourette’s syndrome but an erotic fixation on him; such fixations, as one saw in the case of John Lennon, can lead to murder. Tourette himself was rendered hemiplegic and aphasic by the bullet wound.
3. When “The Lost Mariner” came out, it elicited a letter from Norman Geschwind, one of the most original and creative neurologists in America. I was very excited at hearing from him. I wrote back immediately, but there was no reply, because Geschwind had just had a catastrophic stroke. He was only fifty-eight, but he left an enormous legacy.
4. I longed to be able to communicate with deaf people in their own language, and Kate and I took American Sign Language classes for many months, but, alas, I am terrible at learning other languages and was never able to sign more than a few words and phrases.
5. In a forthcoming book, I describe in more detail our travels in Canada and Europe and across the United States.
6. These brain cuttings were popular sessions which attracted, among others, clinicians eager to see if their diagnoses held up. On one memorable occasion, we examined the brains of five patients who had been diagnosed in life as having multiple sclerosis. The brain cuttings, however, revealed that all of them had been misdiagnosed.
7. In a September 1977 letter, Auntie Len thanked me for my birthday telegram (“[It] warmed the cockles of my eighty-five-year-old heart”) but went on to say, “We were shocked that Professor Luria died. It must be a great personal blow for you. I know how much you valued his friendship. Did you write the Times obituary?” (I did.)
City Island
Though I had left the West Coast for New York in 1965, I stayed in close touch with Thom Gunn, visiting him whenever I was in San Francisco. He now shared an old house with Mike Kitay and, as far as I could judge, four or five other people. There were thousands of books, of course—Thom’s reading was serious, incessant, passionate—but there was also a collection of beer advertisements going back to the 1880s, records galore, and a kitchen full of intriguing spices and smells. Thom and Mike both enjoyed cooking, and the house itself had a sweet flavor, alive with personalities and idiosyncrasies, people wandering to and fro. Having always been solitary myself, I enjoyed these brief glimpses of communal living, which seemed to me full of affection and accommodation (no doubt there were conflicts, too, but I was largely unaware of them).
Thom was always a tremendous walker, striding up and down the hills of San Francisco. I never saw him with a car or a bicycle; he was quintessentially a walker, a walker like Dickens, who observed everything, took it in, and used it, sooner or later, in what he wrote. He liked to prowl around New York, too, and when he visited, we would take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, or a train to some out-of-the-way place, or just go for a walk around the city. We would usually end up in a restaurant, though once I tried to make a meal at my place. (Thom was on antihistamines at the time and felt too sedated to go out.) I am no cook, and everything went wrong; the curry blew up, and I got covered with yellow powder. This incident must have stuck in his mind, for when he sent me his poem “Yellow Pitcher Plant” in 1984, he inscribed the manuscript “For saffron-handed Sacks from Dozy Gunn.”1
In an accompanying letter, he wrote,
How good to see you, o saffron-handed one! I may have seemed in a doze of antihistamines, but I was attentive and interested at the center. I have thought about what you said of anecdote and narrative. I think we all live in a swirl of anecdotes…. We (most of us) compose our lives into narratives…. I wonder what the origin is of the urge to “compose” oneself.
—
We never knew where the conversation would go. On that day, I had read Thom part of an as-yet-unpublished piece about Mr. Thompson, an amnesic patient who had to make himself and his world up every moment. Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative. Thom was fascinated by stories about patients and would often draw me out on the subject (though I needed little encouragement to get going). Looking through our correspondence, I find, in one of his first letters to me, “It was good seeing you last weekend, and Mike and I have been thinking about phantom limbs ever since,” and in another letter, “I remember your discourse about Pain. That will be a fine book too.” (Alas, it was never written.)
Though Thom started in the 1960s to send me all his books (always with charming and idiosyncratic inscriptions), it was only after Migraine came out early in 1971 that I was able to reciprocate. After this the stream ran in both directions, and we wrote to each other regularly (my letters often ran to several pages, while his, incisive and to the point, often came on postcards). We occasionally talked about the process of writing, the rushes and stoppages, the illuminations and darknesses, which seemed to be part and parcel of the creative process.
I had mentioned to him, in 1982, that the almost unbearable delays and breaks and losses of enthusiasm in the composition of my Leg book seemed finally to be coming to an end after eight years. Thom wrote back,
I always felt thwarted you denied us A Leg to Stand On, though perhaps that might yet reach us in a revised version…. I am a bit slothful at the moment. My pattern seems to be: a long cessation of any coherent writing after I have completed a MS, then a tentative start followed by, during the next few years, various separate bursts of activity, ending with a sense of the new book as a whole, in which I make discoveries about my subject(s) that I have never anticipated. It’s strange, the psychology of being a writer. But I suppose it’s better not to be merely facile—the blocks, the feelings of paralysis, the time when language itself seems dead, these all help me in the end, I think, because when the “quickenings” do come they are a
ll the more energetic by contrast.
It was crucial for Thom that his time be his own; his poetry could not be hurried but had to emerge in its own way. So, while he loved teaching (and was much loved by his students), he limited his teaching at Berkeley to one semester a year. This basically provided his only income, apart from occasional reviews or commissioned writing. “My income,” Thom wrote, “averages about half that of a local bus-driver or street sweeper, but it is of my own choosing, since I prefer leisure to working at a full-time job.” But I do not think Thom felt too constrained by his slender means; he had no extravagances (though he was generous with others) and seemed naturally frugal. (Things eased up in 1992, when he received a MacArthur Award, and after this he was able to travel more and enjoy some financial ease, to indulge himself a bit.)
We often wrote to each other about books we were excited by or thought the other would like. (“The best new poet I’ve discovered in years is Rod Taylor…a far-out writer—have you read him yet?” I had not, but immediately got Florida East Coast Champion.) Our tastes did not always coincide, and one book which I had enthused about aroused his contempt and anger and criticism so fierce I was glad it was contained in a private letter. (Like Auden, Thom rarely reviewed what he did not like, and in general his reviews were written in the mode of appreciation.2 I loved the generosity, the balance, of these critical writings, especially in The Occasions of Poetry.)
Thom was far more articulate than I when it came to commenting on each other’s work. I admired almost all of his poems but rarely attempted to analyze them, whereas Thom was always at pains to define, as he saw them, the particular strengths and weaknesses of whatever I sent him. Especially in our early days, I sometimes felt terrified of his directness—terrified, in particular, that he would find my writings, such as they were, muzzy, dishonest, talentless, or worse. I had feared his criticisms at the beginning, but from 1971 on, when I sent him Migraine, I was eager for his reactions, depended on them, and gave them more weight than those of anyone else. In the 1980s, I sent Thom manuscripts of several essays that I wrote to complete The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Some of these he liked very much (particularly “The Autist Artist” and “The Twins”), but one, “Christmas,” he called “a disaster.” (Ultimately, I agreed with him and consigned it to the dustbin.)