From: Oliver Sacks, M.D. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Oliver Sacks, M.D.
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 10:47 PM
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Subject: News from Oliver Sacks, M.D.
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<http://oliversacks.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=51be0abff289ae72c868bd484&id=731e0cd12d&e=74d55b0a79> News from Oliver Sacks, M.D.
July 14, 2010
Dear Readers,
Reading and writing: they go together like love and marriage--don't they? Well, it turns out the story is complicated. Take Howard Engel, a novelist who wrote to Dr. Sacks a few years ago. He had a stroke that suddenly destroyed, with almost surgical precision, his ability to read.
Uncannily, the stroke did not affect Howard’s ability to write at all. And (as Dr. Sacks’s subjects often do) he came up with a remarkable strategy to continue as a novelist, despite being unable to read what he has just written.
You may have seen Dr. Sacks’s essay about Howard in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, but if you missed it, fear not: the unabridged version is included in The <http://oliversacks.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=51be0abff289ae72c868bd484&id=7e2ea1b98f&e=74d55b0a79> Mind’s Eye. You can also read a little bit in July’s Footnote <http://oliversacks.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=51be0abff289ae72c868bd484&id=020e3fb1a0&e=74d55b0a79> of the Month.
The center in our brain for understanding and producing language is uniquely human, having evolved some hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how is it that reading, a cultural invention only a few thousand years old, also has a dedicated center in the brain? If evolution didn’t put it there, what did?
We won’t give it all away here, but the answer involves a lot of your favorite characters and ideas, including Darwin and Wallace, Borges and Japanese poetry, the colorblind <http://oliversacks.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=51be0abff289ae72c868bd484&id=2231541e72&e=74d55b0a79> painter, hyperlexia, musical alexia, the evolution of alphabets, and, of course, amazingly adaptable brains.
Best wishes,
The Sacks office
PS: Please help us grow our newsletter base--forward this to a friend, and invite them to subscribe. Next month's news will be about an upcoming ballet based on Awakenings <http://oliversacks.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=51be0abff289ae72c868bd484&id=14ca490a39&e=74d55b0a79> . Stay tuned!
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