The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat Analysis

The core of a person is very much made up of the brain and its function. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Dr. P, who is a music professor, suffers from visual agnosia and is lost in his own world but is not aware and completely oblivious to the fact. Oliver Sacks states that Dr. P, “saw nothing as familiar. Visually, he was lost in a world of lifeless abstractions. Indeed, he did not have a real visual self” (716). The narrator suggests later tells the readers that he is not able to see into Dr. P’s world, but rather see the results of what is going on in his mind (Sacks 716). In Dr. P’s state of his abstract visual impairment, it actually opens the narrators eyes. It opens his eyes to see that without proper perception, reason, logic, and sense, life cannot be lived to its’ fullest potential. Sacks includes in the story,

Neurology and psychology, curiously, though they talk of everything else, almost never talk of

P. mistook his wife for a hat, it is revealed to the readers by the doctor narrator, that judgement is a crucial part of life. No one should mistaken their wife for a hat or vise versa! The narrator makes it clear that due to a lack understanding, comprehension, and receiving of personalities, emotions, and situations it will always be impossible to read the room, truly love someone, understand someone, find jokes easy to laugh at, etc. To Dr. P. it will always be impossible to discern and read behind what people actually say versus what they mean. Lack of judgement is Dr. P.’s very downfall, according to the events described.

An animal, or a man, may get on very well without “abstract attitude” but will speedily perish if deprived of judgement. Judgement must be the first faculty of higher life or mind- yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational)neurology. And if we wonder how such an absurdity can arise, we find it in the assumption, or the evolution , of neurology itself. (Sacks