Want to learn the ideas in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks here.

Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.

Video Summaries of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Oliver Sacks.

1-Page Summary of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Overall Summary

The book is divided into four parts, each of which consists of a series of brief case studies centered around an aspect of neurology.

In the first part of this book, Sacks discusses neurological disorders that can be viewed as deficits in an ordinary function of the brain. He argues that most medical communities define almost all neurological disorders as deficits in some way. However, he claims that the paradigm of mental illness as a deficit is too narrow because it marginalizes right hemisphere disorders and underestimates subjects’ abilities to compensate for their illness.

In this section, we’ll discuss several patients. One of them is Dr. P., who has a rare form of face blindness that prevents him from recognizing his own wife’s face. Jimmie G., on the other hand, suffers from Korsakov’s Syndrome and can’t remember anything for more than a few seconds at a time. Another patient is Christina, who loses her sense of proprioception and can’t feel her body or control it properly; she claims to have no control over her hands because of cerebral palsy. Mr. MacGregor also has Parkinson’s disease and walks with a tilt because his mind doesn’t integrate information from the vestibular system correctly anymore (because he has Parkinson’s). Mrs S cannot conceive “left” after having had a stroke in which part of her brain was destroyed.

Throughout the book, Sacks shows how patients find ways to compensate for their deficiencies. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they train themselves to work around their problems and live relatively normal lives.

In part two, Sacks discusses neurological illnesses that can be explained as an excess of a certain mental process. He talks about the effects on day to day life rather than just talking about what parts of the brain are affected.

In part 2, Sacks discusses several patients who’ve suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. Until the middle of the 1970s, Tourette’s was thought to be incredibly rare. However, during that decade doctors realized that it is very common and they began to study it more thoroughly. They started using tests that were more clinical instead of mechanical ones in order to understand what exactly was going on with their patients’ brains. Sacks also talks about how some people have a disease or disorder but experience benefits because of them; for example syphilis has been known to cause people to feel energetic and lively after having an episode. He also brings up William Thompson who couldn’t remember anything but had many different identities so he could still think of himself as someone despite not having any memories at all.

Part three of the book discusses people who have a neurological condition that causes them to see things differently. Sacks talks about two women who heard music in their heads, and he guesses they had seizures in the temporal lobes of their brains. He also writes about Bhagawhandi P., an Indian girl who became euphoric after she developed a terminal tumor; this seems like it could be a seizure as well. Another patient, Donald, murdered his child while high on PCP but later forgot all about it. Later, after sustaining head trauma from another accident, Donald experienced killing again and again in vivid detail–but he was able to cope with these visions by developing strategies for dealing with them. The final person Sacks talks about is Hildegard of Bingen (a famous Christian mystic) whose visions may have been caused by recurring seizures which allowed her to experience vivid hallucinations which she interpreted as divinely inspired. One can dismiss Hildegard’s visions as “merely” physiological in origin but one can still respect her imagination and intelligence while continuing to believe that God spoke through her because of her piety.