"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.