"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" Blog Assignment

In the book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” Dr. Oliver Sacks takes the reader through many odd and puzzling clinical tales.  Many of these stories involve patients who suffer from malfunctions in their brains.  Two in particular stood out to me; “The lost Mariner” and “Witty Ticcy Ray.”

            In the chapter entitled “The Lost Mariner,” Dr. Sacks talks to a person who suffered from massive memory loss.  The patient, Jimmie, could not remember a large portion of his life.  Prior to his memory loss, Jimmie’s drinking became excessive.  I believe that Jimmie’s alcoholism combined with other factors, such as stress, caused damage to Jimmie’s Hippocampus.  The hippocampus is one of the brain structures that make up the limbic system.  The hippocampus is critical in forming new factual and autobiographical memories.  Hippocampus damage can result in anterograde amnesia and loss of the ability to form new memories, although older memories may be safe. Thus, someone who sustains an injury to the hippocampus may have good memory of his childhood and the years before the injury, but relatively little memory for anything that happened since.  This explains why Jimmie could remember his past in the navy, but couldn’t remember the people or things he came in contact with as time passed on. 

The other chapter that intrigued me was “Witty Ticcy Ray.”  In this chapter, a young man, Ray, had a terrible form of Tourette’s Syndrome.  This caused him to have uncontrollable ticks. He was constantly hyper-active and always had excess amounts of energy.  It’s not known what causes Tourette’s. But we do know it’s a result of abnormalities in the development of the brain and the nervous system. I believe that the Tourette’s syndrome was affecting Ray’s thalamus and frontal lobes.  The thalamus processes and relays movement and sensory information. It is essentially a relay station, taking in sensory information and then passing it on to the cerebral cortex, and the frontal lobe is involved in planning and muscle movement. When an individual has Tourette’s syndrome, they cannot control certain muscle movements, and because the thalamus relays information for such movements, and the frontal lobe is also involved in controlling muscle movement, it has led me to believe that Ray’s Tourette’s affected the way his thalamus relayed information and the function of his frontal lobe. 

Both these patients, Jimmie and Ray, show us that the brain is a complex and complicated system.  If just one portion of the brain is damaged or affected by disease, there can be tragic consequences.  “The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” does an excellent job of showing us that.  

Awakenings Movie Analyzation

Recently, in my AP Psychology class, my peers and I viewed a film entitled "Awakenings," which is based on a memoir written by Dr. Oliver Sacks.  In the film, a psychologist named Malcom Sayer (Robin Williams) awakens a catatonic patient called Leonard (Robert DeNiro) through the use of a new drug called L-Dopa. Once Leonard is awake, he must try to adjust to his new environment while discovering the marvelous effect of the drug is not long-term.  Leonard soon return to his catatonic state.  Some of the methods and ethics used by Dr. Sayer (representing Dr. Oliver Sacks) were questionable, while others commendable.
The ethical procedure surrounding Dr. Sayer's research and experimentation was quite questionable.  Dr. Sayer was so eager to test his theory that the L-Dopa treatment would help Leonard return from his catatonic state, that he took little precaution before administering the drug to his patient.  There was no experimentation on animals, or any other studies other than the research of others on how the drug affects patients with Parkinson's disease.  Dr, Sayer administered the drug to Leonard and when nothing happened, he upped the dosage until a reaction was apparent without evaluating the consequences of his actions.  He had no idea what the short or long term effects of the drug would be.  Today, no psychologist would be allowed to do such a thing.  However, a couple things he did do right according to today's ethical guidelines were the fact that he obtained consent from Leonard's mother before administering the drug, and he also explained his research to Leonard once he woke from his catatonic state.
In his research, Dr. Sayer followed the scientific method in a haphazard way.  He began with his theory that the drug L-Dopa might have a positive effect on patients in a catatonic state. His hypothesis on the subject was that the L-Dopa would awaken these unfortunate patients.  His experiment consisted of him administering L-Dopa to Leonard without any measured way of doing so.  He just upped the doses in measures that he saw fit at the time.  Also, Dr. Sayer had no real control for the experiment.  He only had one subject, Leonard, who only received the experimental control, the L-Dopa.  The independent variable in this experiment was the L-Dopa, which was administered in various doses over the course of one night.  The dependent variable, which is the thing being measured, was the reaction Leonard experienced because of the drug. It turned out that the L-Dopa caused Leonard to awaken, which in many aspects makes this experiment a scientific breakthrough.
In the end, Leonard returned to his catatonic state.  The consequences of Dr. Sayer's unethical and hasty experimentation had grave consequences for Leonard and others who received the L-Dopa for their catatonic states.  Though the brief success of awakening the patients was shadowed by an ultimate failure, in the end it was proven that L-Dopa did play a part in the disease which caused such a tragic state.  Though the result of Dr. Sayer's research was tragic, it opened new doors for exploring the effects of L-Dopa and the refinement of the treatment to awaken catatonic patients and keep them awake for good.