Summary Of Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

The process in which people interpret and organize sensation to produce a meaningful experience of the world is commonly known as perception. According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, there are several components to perception. Professor Jim Davies lists this components as typical sensory modalities. The aim of this essay is to describe the base example of perception used in lecture and explain perceptual problems throughout the novel using target examples. Perception happens through the sensory organs of a human and with that perception comes action via the human body. Dr. Sacks transcribed an altered perception when discussing patients in his first section, Losses.

Dr. Sacks tells the story of a special form of visual agnosia in his first chapter, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The patient in this tale was Dr. James Purdon Martin, referred to as Dr. P throughout the narrative, who perceived his wife as a hat. He looked at her using his eyes and began to use his arms to reach out for her head

In cognitive terms, this is young man is an example of a misperception in kinesthesia. The inability to comprehend the loss of limb is both terrifying and unnerving. In the story at hand, the patient believes that what they see is unlike anything he has seen before. The patient believed the leg he found in his bed was not his own. In terror and amazement, he was stupefied when Dr. Sacks informed him the leg he had been seeing was his own. When Dr. Sacks asked him where he thought his leg was he simply said it disappeared, was gone and no where to be found. There is a complete loss of awareness in his limb. Therefore, this young man had no proprioception so much so that he lacked the ability to not only identify his own leg, but he was unable to perceive the leg he found to be his own. This man described the leg as looking like nothing on