The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat Sparknotes

In Doctor Oliver Sacks’ book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales,” the reader follows Sacks’ recounting of odd mental health mysteries that he had encountered in his career and how he responded to them. Sorted into a great number of short-story-style recitations of abnormal maladies that Doctor Sacks’ patients were afflicted with, this novel explores a numerous amount of different cerebral sicknesses. These sicknesses vary massively from patient to patient in the symptoms and in how they manifest themselves. Throughout all of these, however, runs a strain of similarity: these are either unprecedented or very uncommon maladies that perplex the treatment teams helping the clients in the book, making it difficult

to help exponentially. Some clients in the doctor’s recorded accounts seemed to have found ways on their own to help ease their suffering or confusion, while others are not even at a functioning level to do so. Personally, I found that this novel related to sensation, perception, memory, thinking and decision-making, and psychological disorders and therapy, which connects to my life as a music therapy major in undergraduate college.
The first story that captured my attention greatly was the first account in the entire novel. Chapter one, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” threw me into the deep end of the metal abnormalities and took me aback. Doctor P., the man afflicted in this first chapter, seemed at a place in his life that was simply beyond words. He is said to have looked at people without seeing them which could have presented itself just as a visual impairment, but his literal mistaking his wife for a hat was a heartbreaking turn to his story, as he was more far gone than previously evidenced. This chapter shows an impairment in both sensation and perception. His detection of outside stimuli was obviously impaired from the tumor, and his perception was impaired, as he misidentified things and could not seem to recognize others at all. This story became all the more enthralling to me when Doctor Sacks recounts his experience at the house of the client and his wife. Mrs. P. explained to Doctor Sacks that her husband would not do many things without the aid of music, either hearing it or creating it; he even identified some students by their body-music. As a music therapist in training, I find this absolutely brilliant. Doctor P.’s ailment is eased so much by music, and he is all but lost without music, as evidenced when a visitor came to his house and stopped his internal music momentarily. Doctor Sacks eventually told Doctor P. that he should live the rest of his life completely submerged in music- a decision which I fully support in this case. Were I in Doctor Sacks’ place, I would have recommended that the client see a music therapist, as music is such an integral part of his life. I have seen in my practicing of music therapy with the older adult population that music can facilitate increased cognitive functioning, movement, reminiscing, and relaxation. A resident at a nursing home one time who had not spoken in weeks came to our music therapy session and ended up dancing and talking about her daughter and her time overseas with her late husband. This chapter focused on sensation and perception, and I would argue that it missed the opportunity to include an adjunctive therapy which just might have helped Doctor P. immensely in his sensation and perception of the world around him.
Chapter three, “The Disembodied Lady,” was the next chapter that stood out to me in this book.

In this section, the reader is introduced to a woman, Christina, whose nightmare of losing control of her limbs and losing her fine and gross motor skills was realized. One portion mentions that her hands roamed and she was seemingly unaware of this happening. This stuck out to me because it seems a lot like an aspect of an episode of dissociation. Because of past events in my life, I experience dissociation in various forms relatively frequently, so I felt drawn to this story. Based on knowledge of neuroscience from that portion of the course, I would assume that the Basal Ganglia was affected in some way, causing the movement to be stunted. Additionally, from this part of the class, we learned that acetylcholine enables muscle action and that dopamine influences movement, so I feel that it is possible that these neurotransmitters played a part in Christina’s difficulties. She also expresses in the chapter that her body does not feel like her own- a concept similar to that of depersonalization, though much more extreme and permanent in her case. We learn that she accomplished no recovery neurologically, but rather had to relearn how she could recreate actions that she had learned how to do long ago. Structure of the brain should alter in order to facilitate function, but in her case, carrying out tasks never got easier. Although she was constantly positively reinforced

intrinsically when she accomplished a task and felt proud or relieved that she could do it, the learning never got easier or became concrete so that she could do what she needed to without immense focus. She also struggled with maintaining the knowledge that she used to be able to move on her own with little effort- she was reminded through watching old videos of herself. Finally, Christina not only suffered physically from the affliction, but also emotionally because people in public could not see anything physically wrong with her and would verbally abuse her for not being at the same level of physical capability as them. This explicit bias is something that I have experienced for different reasons than Christina, but the vein of needless intolerance remains the same. Knowing that all of her focus needs to be on her task at hand, using her social cognition to reason through why people were treating her poorly likely impaired her physical functioning as it merited constant decision-making in order to operate. A lot of learning and perception was explored in this chapter in relation the Christina’s affliction, and her peculiar condition is one that mirrors certain mental health symptoms, but takes them to a new level.
Chapter sixteen, “Incontinent Nostalgia,” also caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

Of course, having worked with the older adult population, I am always drawn to stories that humanize these individuals, as I have seen their families leave them, and I have seen the general public mistreat them, simply due to ageism. Additionally, I was drawn to this chapter because of how it reminded me of an earlier chapter, which was chapter eleven- “Cupid’s Disease.” Chapter sixteen recounts the experience of the patient who had irregular effects from the drug L-Dopa. The patient in this chapter was diagnosed with progressive post-encephalitic Parkinson’s when she was eighteen. The drug temporarily relieved many of her symptoms from the disease, but it brought with it other strange symptoms. These included a change in her personality and an awakening of long dormant memories or songs, slang, and experiences from when she was much younger. After getting herself back from these episodes, she could not recall the songs or words that she had said, and could not remember having still known them. Her revitalized youthfulness and increased libido reminded me of chapter eleven because these were symptoms experienced by Natasha K., who was experiencing effects of syphilis, or as she called it, Cupid’s Disease. More detail was given in chapter eleven, so we know that Natasha was so thrilled about having her juvenile spirit back, she was in no rush to get a treatment for the illness. Natasha’s

way of dealing with the disease made me think about loss aversion; she would rather enjoy the positive effects of the illness than lose the side effects by getting it treated because gaining her wellbeing was less important than avoiding the loss of radiance. This youthful and playful spirit exhibited by the two women in these chapters reminds me of a resident at the nursing home where I interned who also has Parkinson’s. The resident was one of the older residents at the facility, but she had the most enlivened sprit. She was constantly flirting with my supervisor; she would throw a fit if he did not sit near enough to her, and she would playfully take the egg shakers and refuse to give them back, teasing us. These women all seem to have felt the endowment effect wherein they felt the energy of their youth returned to them and it felt so valuable and familiar that they seemed to enjoy it. Chapters eleven and sixteen related to the patterns of thinking in older adults who had experiences with L-Dopa that brought back their thinking and way of carrying themselves from decades prior to the incidents recorded by Doctor Sacks.
Doctor Oliver Sacks’ accounts of mental health anomalies in his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales,” while outlandish, can be related to many things, both in scholarly settings and in everyday life experiences. The stories contained in this book were out of the ordinary, to be sure, but very real and very frightening, as many could not be linked to any one cause or any cure or effective treatment. It is relevant because these afflictions could affect anyone. From problems with eyesight and perception, to problems with body movements and control, to altered states of mind and personality components, the patients in the book differed greatly in their struggles, but found a common thread in that their conditions were nonstandard, meriting their inclusion in the book. This reading opened my eyes as a future Board Certified Music Therapist to the types of atypical sicknesses that patients may want treated, as I have mostly worked with patients with very standard physical or mental illnesses at this point in my life; reading this was beneficial because it enlightened me on other sicknesses in the world that may not be covered in the textbooks or experienced by myself firsthand. I discovered that Doctor Sacks’ novel touched on a range of psychological topics including, but not limited to, sensation and perception, memory, thinking, decision-making, and mental disorders.