Responding to Luria's work on higher cortical functions

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Letters to the editors of 'The Lancet' and 'JAMA'

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Responding to Luria's work on higher cortical functions

Oliver Sacks Scientist

	Views	Duration
121. The blissful feeling having written Migraine	297	01:11
122. Wanting to publish addendums to Migraine	266	02:11
123. The publishing of Migraine	274	02:20
124. Starting to see the Awakenings patients	322	00:46
125. The use of L-DOPA in the Awakenings patients	472	01:46
126. Positive reviews for Migraine	261	01:26
127. Drafting books on 'tics', sub-cortical functions and...	249	01:28
128. Responding to Luria's work on higher cortical functions	267	01:03
129. Letters to the editors of 'The Lancet' and 'JAMA'	243	04:07
130. Encouragement from James Purdon Martin	316	00:56

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Luria had written a... a magnificent book on higher cortical functions. I felt that what I had been seeing, especially in these patients, was the activation of subcortical functions of one sort and another. The great Swiss neurophysiologist Hess had the same feeling that these patients with encephalitis lethargica illuminated all sorts of subcortical functions, and his work on that had won him a Nobel Prize. And now I was seeing this for myself especially with the wild activations of L-DOPA. So I had a torso book, so that was a very busy month. I wrote the nine case histories of Awakenings, something like 40,000 words on tics, and at least the torso of this book on subcortical functions.

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) was born in England. Having obtained his medical degree at Oxford University, he moved to the USA. There he worked as a consultant neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital where in 1966, he encountered a group of survivors of the global sleepy sickness of 1916-1927. Sacks treated these patients with the then-experimental drug L-Dopa producing astounding results which he described in his book Awakenings. Further cases of neurological disorders were described by Sacks with exceptional sympathy in another major book entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat which became an instant best seller on its publication in 1985. His other books drew on his rich experiences as a neurologist gleaned over almost five decades of professional practice. Sacks's work was recognized by prestigious institutions which awarded him numerous honours and prizes. These included the Lewis Thomas Prize given by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He was an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.

Title: Responding to Luria's work on higher cortical functions

Listeners: Kate Edgar

Kate Edgar, previously Managing Editor at the Summit Books division of Simon and Schuster, began working with Oliver Sacks in 1983. She has served as editor and researcher on all of his books, and has been closely involved with various films and adaptations based on his work. As friend, assistant, and collaborator, she has accompanied Dr Sacks on many adventures around the world, clinical and otherwise.

Tags: Awekenings, Alexander Romanovich Luria, Walter Hess

Duration: 1 minute, 3 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2011

Date story went live: 02 October 2012