In the NBC television drama "Brilliant Minds," a maverick physician obsessed with solving his patients' neurological issues employs bold, unconventional methods to unlock the mysteries of the brain. It's based on the work of a real maverick: Oliver Sacks.
Born in London, Sacks (1933-2015) moved to America in 1960 to launch his career. A neurologist, he wound up working at a Bronx medical facility housing patients with a rare brain disease who could not speak or move.
Experimenting with a drug, L-dopa, Sacks found that some patients improved dramatically before returning to their previous statuelike state. Robin Williams played a fictionalized version of Sacks in the 1990 movie, "Awakenings."
Dig Into Your Field Like Oliver Sacks
Sacks, who died in 2015 from cancer, lives on through his bestselling books. As a practicing neurologist who wrote over a dozen popular books about his clinical and personal experiences, he has influenced generations of neurologists.
"He was a brilliant guy and a humanist at heart," said Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. "One-on-one, he was shy. But he communicated powerfully through writing."
Klitzman knew Sacks for 30 years. Decades before meeting him, he admired Sacks from afar. As a college undergrad, Klitzman read "Awakenings" as part of his "Sociology and Medicine" course. "It stood out," he recalled. "He was a gifted writer."
Know That Success Takes Time
For much of his 20s, 30s and 40s, Sacks struggled to make an impact. He was a late bloomer.
At age 52, his fourth book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," became a surprise hit. It lifted Sacks to stardom.
"Until then, he had suffered many rejections and several firings from jobs," said Bill Hayes, Sacks' partner for the last six years of his life. "But he had a core belief in his own vision" and persevered.
Oliver Sacks: See Life Through Patients' Eyes
Sacks explored often-overlooked conditions that afflicted many patients. Examples included autism, Parkinson's disease, Tourette syndrome, schizophrenia and epilepsy.
"He started to write about autism before it became in fashion," said Hayes, author of the memoir, "Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me." Thanks in part to Sacks, rising public awareness and understanding led to the autism rights movement.
A key to Sacks' success was his determination to see each patient as a fully dimensional human being. Friends marveled at his deep wellspring of empathy for others.
"I try to imagine myself in the life of my patients," he often said.
This approach enabled him to study their condition free from biases or preconceived notions. He got to know them — and sought ways to help them — without judging what some might see as their abnormal or unorthodox lives.
"Oliver was a great listener," Hayes said. "He thought of patients not as having syndromes, but as having differences. He considered (their conditions) differences, not disorders."
Sacks admired pioneering 19th century physicians who believed in observing patients and asking genial, nonjudgmental questions. He fondly quoted William Osler's maxim, "Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has."
Oliver Sacks: Work Through Barriers
As a young neurologist, Sacks overcame adversity before achieving success. For years, he lacked direction and engaged in self-destructive behavior.
He battled an addiction to amphetamines and job-hopped. In a newly released collection of his correspondence, "Letters," Sacks writes about his early love of weight lifting at Muscle Beach in Venice, Calif., his attraction to motorcycles and San Francisco's leather scene.
He butted heads with supervisors at hospitals for his eccentricities. Eating food from patients' trays, he described his "untidiness, unpunctuality, huge size, waddling gait."
For much of his 40s, he struggled with writer's block. It took him over a decade to complete his third book, "A Leg to Stand On."
"It was an 11-year torture for him," Hayes said. "He went through many, many drafts."
But he didn't give up. Even though the book didn't reach a wide audience at the time, simply finishing it proved a springboard for Sacks.
A year later, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" came out — and changed his life.
"He became famous overnight," Hayes said. "Overcoming everything he went through, he became incredibly productive and was very disciplined by the time I met him" in 2008.
Marvel At The Natural World
Curiosity drove Sacks. He had an insatiable appetite for knowledge.
Armed with a medical degree from University of Oxford, he left for America with an intellectual hunger to learn and grow.
In addition to his primary course of study in medicine, he maintained long-standing interests in botany, geology, chemistry and mathematics.
His photographic memory enabled him to retain vast amounts of information.
"He could quote long passages from Darwin" by heart, Hayes said. "He was a great reader" who built an immense library over his lifetime.
In fact, Sacks viewed Charles Darwin as a heroic figure.
"Just as Darwin used all his senses to gather data from the natural world, Sacks was incredibly curious about the natural world," said Klitzman, who's also director of Columbia University's masters of bioethics program. "Each used their skills to carefully describe things in plain sight that others failed to recognize as important and then integrate large volumes of information to make sense of the chaos."
Even a casual walk in a city park could arouse Sacks' powers of observation. Strolling along the High Line in Manhattan, Sacks noticed ferns emerging from the sidewalk.
"He wondered about the plants growing in the cracks," Klitzman said. "He had boundless curiosity."
Connect With Your Fans
As his fame grew, he received more and more letters from readers. He aimed to reply to each one, even when the annual total approached 5,000.
His commitment to respond paid off.
When Susan R. Barry wrote him a nine-page letter in December 2004, his reply led to a 10-year friendship. She was describing a dramatic change in her vision that intrigued him — and he wanted to learn more.
"I was severely cross-eyed from infancy, and I developed stereo vision later in life," said Barry, professor emerita of biological sciences at Mount Holyoke College. This clashed with the prevailing dogma, so she doubted most scientists and physicians would believe her.
Five weeks after sending her letter, Barry hosted lunch for Sacks at her home. He brought two friends, an ophthalmologist and visual scientist, to help investigate her case.
"I was nervous but he never made me feel self-conscious," said Barry, author of the book, "Dear Oliver." "Many other scientists have asked to study me. But he didn't make me feel like a subject. He was always searching for what's it like to be in somebody else's head and body."
Inspire Hope
Clearing dishes after lunch, she didn't eat the blueberries in her fruit salad. But she noticed they were gone.
"You left your blueberries and I ate them," Sacks said with an impish smile.
Forging an instant bond, they wound up exchanging over 150 letters — the last one three weeks before Sacks died. Sacks wrote about Barry in his 2006 "New Yorker" essay, "Stereo Sue," and devoted a chapter in his book, "The Mind's Eye" to her as well.
Sacks' willingness to examine at problems in unique ways still inspires many looking to unlock secrets of the brain. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, formerly of the FDA and now CEO of research firm Right Brain Bio, consulted with Sacks on a question many years ago. "The back and forth with Sacks was fantastic, partly because of who I was communicating with and partly because of how clear he was," Sackner-Bernstein wrote. Sackner-Bernstein is working on an unusual and potentially promising treatment for Parkinson's disease.
"From my experience with him, I bet that our robust data would have been enough to pique Sacks' curiosity," Sackner-Berstein wrote.
Oliver Sacks' Keys:
- Pioneering neurologist and bestselling author who revolutionized our understanding of the human brain.
- Overcame: Early years of substance abuse and firings from jobs, and 11 years of writer's block, to gain fame at age 52.
- "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude."
