7 ms·
Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies – what was the cost?
https://archive.ph/0MFPK https://archive.ph/0MFPK
- rendaw 10mo agoSubtitle > The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality. TLDR > after her grandmother’s death...she becomes decisive, joining a theatre group.... in the transcripts... [she] never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair. AFAICT the quote above is the only thing directly relevant to the title. From what I read, skimming through the article, it paints Sacks as being a delusion driven emotional romantic and was practicing some sort of cult medicine, but I can't tell how much of that is reality and how much is NYT's ridiculously flowery embellishing of everything.
- AdamN 10mo agoJust a nit but it's the New Yorker, not the NYT.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- cryzinger 10mo agoAlso worth noting that the New Yorker published a lot of essays from Sacks when he was alive. So there's a sort of meta thing happening here with a biography of one of their famous contributors.
- AdamN 10mo agoYeah he was the consummate neurotic New Yorker writing for the New Yorker and now in death he has been woven directly into the New Yorker.
- burningChrome 10mo agoI agree that its a hard read, and seemingly never got to the point of the title of the article. I started reading it and by about the eighth or nineth paragraph the article was still ruminating on his gay love affair so I just skimmed the rest and I couldn't make heads or tails of the rest of it either. Its shocking how bad some writers are these days.
- RodgerTheGreat 10mo agoThe New Yorker's primary editorial thrust has always been that the author is more important than the subject, and the journey is more important than having a thesis at all.
- IAmBroom 10mo agoThank you. You've just summed it up for me. <chef's kiss>
- paleotrope 10mo agoIf you go further, the whole thing wraps around. His suppression of his own sexuality, led him to embellish, to write out his own internal dialogue into the "nonfiction" books he wrote. So it all eventually comes back to the thesis, but yes, it's a huge drag to read through, but then Sacks' own writing is so turgid and overly dramatic, like he was writing for an audience. The first sentence too is apt, "butter colored suit that reminded him of the sun" is a great example of Sacks' writing style.
- cryzinger 10mo agoRespectfully, I'm not sure you can draw meaningful conclusions about a 100+ paragraph deep-dive article after reading the first eight or nine. The biography stuff is definitely relevant to the takeaways about Sacks' methodology and style: > Other doctors had dismissed these patients as hopeless, but Sacks had sensed that they still had life in them—a recognition that he understood was possible because he, too, felt as if he were “buried alive.” [...] > Another patient is so aroused and euphoric that she tells Sacks [according to his telling in Awakenings], “My blood is champagne”—the phrase Sacks used to describe himself when he was in love with Vincze. [...] > “I know, in a way, you don’t feel like living,” Sacks tells her, in another recorded session. “Part of one feels dead inside, I know, I know that. . . . One feels that one wants to die, one wants to end it, and what’s the use of going on?” > “I don’t mean it in that way,” she responds. > “I know, but you do, partly,” Sacks tells her. “I know you have been lonely all your life.”
- usednet 10mo agoA responsible journalist can't say directly that Sacks was a confabulist but they can point out facts and allow the reader to infer. That's what the article does. There are many facts in the article that are relevant to the title in this sense (the prime number twins, the journal entries about Hat, etc.). I also don't agree with your interpretation of what the article is trying to paint Sacks as, though of course you are entitled to it. I think the the point of the article is to articulate what Sacks himself said: > "As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They suffer, authentically, a good deal. Gifted, too. Brave, resourceful, challenging.”"
- tomcam 10mo agoHaven’t read the article yet, but I love the respect with which you pointed out your differences to GP. thank you.
- devilbunny 10mo agoAs a general rule, neurologists are an odd bunch. I'm married to one; I've met lots of them at her conferences.
- ajb 10mo agoThe stereotype, which is sometimes true, is that people do that kind of degree because they want to understand and solve their own issues. Those who are are interested in people as such, can be more drawn to anthropology.
- devilbunny 10mo agoMore true of psychiatry than neurology, though there is of course some overlap. The running joke in neurology is that neurologists are left-handed migraneurs/euses. I was once at a small dinner talk by a well-respected headache specialist, surrounded by a dozen neurologists. He asked, "How many here have chronic headaches?" Every hand went up except mine and the drug rep's.
- rendx 10mo agoIn case this piqued your interest, I really enjoyed the documentary about his life's journey, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks%3A_His_Own_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks%3A_His_Own_Life - can recommend! (Also, fan of his books and research.)
- BeetleB 10mo agoI second the documentary. Also a very notable statistic/anecdote at the end. I don't know how wide the scope (only one university?), but about a third of the incoming neurology students chose the field because of Oliver Sacks. I always found the bulk of the criticism leveled against him to be faulty. However, if he did indeed fabricate a lot of details - it is concerning.
- IAmBroom 10mo agoSo, something like how Star Trek inspired most of NASA scientists?
- sshadmand 10mo agoLoved Oliver Sacks. He was such a kid at heart with a big brain and soft demeanor. His interviews are great. Here is one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AnuxDdg2II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AnuxDdg2II It is rare a lisp can improve how one sounds, but I like his.
- svat 10mo agoThis was a nice profile of (one side of) Sacks and his life, and as usual some mischievous or click-seeking online editor has given it a headline (and sub-heading) that are almost completely unrelated to what the article is about. In fact, at the bottom it says: > Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2025, issue, with the headline “Mind Over Matter.” and a headline like that (saying nothing) would be more appropriate to this. The very fact that Sacks wrote about his patients has always had its detractors—based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, someone called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”—but what was surprising (to me) from this article is that it seems that after that early book, he actually became careful not to exaggerate or make up stories, to the extent that someone closely following him looking for discrepancies was not able to find any. I would have expected the stories to be mostly fictional, but it appears that this is so only of his early books.
- svat 10mo agoI assumed the books were somewhat fictional (i.e. they were Gladwell-style) because if he meant to make a claim seriously he'd have published in a medical journal instead of a popular/literary book. But since writing the comment above, I've learned that over the years many people actually believed that all details in the books were literally true (you can search for e.g. [Sacks prime] to see many people who took the story seriously and analyzed them), which does put things in a different light.
- sincerely 10mo agoI’ll do you one better, I believed Gladwell wasn’t writing fiction either.
- erikgahner 10mo agoNot OP but I guess Gladwell-style can be understood as writing that is presented as nonfictional but has more in common with fictional writing.
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- Ambolia 10mo agoSteven Pinker on this article: >https://x.com/sapinker/status/1999297395478106310 https://x.com/sapinker/status/1999297395478106310 >"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."
- thaw13579 10mo agoCurious why this comment is being flagged if anyone minds explaining.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- netfortius 10mo agoPinker's tweet is how I actually ended up reading the article, then searching on HN for a possible related post. I read Sacks' major books, and I was always surprised by what I thought being his talent to romanticize real life. I guess it was too good to be (completely) true, after all :(
- readthenotes1 10mo agoNot shocked. "Science" of the 1900s was heavily influenced by people willing to do whatever it took to achieve fame or fortune. The replication crisis is the result.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10mo ago> "Science" of the 1900s Science of any kind, looked at dispassionately, is more of a cult than we're prepared to admit. Not a discussion we're going to have any time soon, not until the miracles run out.
- rixed 10mo agoCould you leave us some hints about what you are alluding to ? Or even better, clearly and honestly spell out what you actually think?
- christoph 10mo agoI can’t speak for the author, but I attended a science conference earlier this year that was almost half science, half healing/meditation workshops. I’m not going to name names, but there were some pretty big academic names there who also have clearly woken up to modern science being more than a bit cult like. Research a couple of areas of science that are currently verboten and see who & what you find there maybe? It’s just quiet whispers in small conferences at the moment, but this is how the breaking of all spells begins. The momentum is & will continue to build, and probably quicker than many imagine (or will like!).
- karmakurtisaani 10mo agoThis sounds vaguely terrifying!
- IAmBroom 10mo agoAnd intentionally so. "I'm not going to name names, but Many Famous People have done X! You'd be shocked if I backed my claims up with any support whatsoever, but I can't, because <vague morality implications>..."
- webwielder2 10mo agoI actually set that book down while reading it and said, “this sounds made up.” Ahh the quiet satisfaction of witnessless vindication.
- throwaway81523 10mo agoYeah the thing about the twins calling out 20 digit prime numbers did it for me. Even allowing for the twins having some ridiculous magical ability to think up such primes, Sacks iirc claimed to confirm the numbers' primality by looking them up in a table of primes. Nuh uh. Added: ok, found a more careful description. https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and-prime-numbers/ https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and...
- gusgus01 10mo agoWhile I also doubt the twins ability to calculate unknown primes, I do think that the article falls prey to many of the same trappings that they are calling out Oliver Sacks for. While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed. Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof. Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
- milofentriss 10mo agoYes, it's lovely when that happens.
- RachelF 10mo agoOr more recently Dan Kahneman, Dan Arielly or Stephen Jay Gould have also been caught fabricating details or whole results.
- unmole 10mo ago> Dan Kahneman I know the underpowered studies cited in Thinking Fast and Slow didn't replicate but I don't think there was any fabrication?
- eviks 10mo agoThe famously ironic case of honesty in a study about honesty https://retractionwatch.com/2021/09/14/highly-criticized-paper-on-dishonesty-retracted/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/09/14/highly-criticized-pap...
- BeetleB 10mo agoThat's Dan Ariely. I don't think there's any known example of Kahnemann fabricating data.
- Analemma_ 10mo agoAs fair as I know none of the research by Kahemann himself is suspect, but a lot of the studies he cited in Thinking Fast and Slow, especially the ones about priming, have failed to replicate. YMMV on what this implies for the book as a whole.
- BeetleB 10mo agoHe's open about the priming chapter concern: https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/ https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...
- regularization 10mo ago
- rendall 10mo ago> When [Sacks] woke up in the middle of the night with an erection, he would cool his penis by putting it in orange jello. This is a remarkable sentence, and it appears suddenly in the article without context or explanation. Naturally, there are questions. Was it necessarily orange jello? Does orange refer to the flavor or the color? What property of this particular jello made it preferable to other flavors and colors of jello? Did he prepare the jello for this particular purpose, or did he have other uses for the orange jello? What were they? Did he reuse jello or discard it after one use? Most important though: why would he do this?? The article does not say.
- c-c-c-c-c 10mo agoIt is a great article.
- rendall 10mo agoIt is. I might sound critical, but my criticism is not of the article. Nor of Sacks and his jello, really.
- conductr 10mo agoIt says why in the quote, to “cool” it. I have never tried it myself but it seems like it would be effective for that purpose.
- fsckboy 10mo agoyour comment in the context of jello makes me think of Cool Whip, but that takes us to "You must whip it: Whip it good!" and here we are full circle.
- dredmorbius 10mo agoI've heard (though cannot find any supporting references) that Devo's song "Whip It" referred to "whippets", nitrous oxide cannisters which could produce a brief but euphoric high. <https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/what-are-whippets https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/what-are-whipp...> Context was a stage performance (not by Devo) roughly 20 years ago, referring to late 1970s / early 1980s youth culture. The song itself was released in 1980: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip_It_(Devo_song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip_It_(Devo_song)>
- Akasazh 10mo agoI think the title doesn't really give a good impression of the contents of the article. The article spends most time on evolution Sacks' homosexual identity and struggle with sexuality and repression. His uncertainty and melancholical bouts maar him question his own work and make the author conclude him 'putting himself in his work'. However very little evidence is presented. Most insinuated about is 'awakenings' yet even in that case it's hard to reach conclusions. The author plays of his perennial self-doubt as aan admission, but there's very scant evidence about him actually making up stories. I'm not saying his method is our isn't flawed, it's just that the title belies the story. The struggle with his sexuality is the main subject and only small bits are about his uncertainty of his work.
- pessimizer 10mo agoYou're leaving out that he made up stories, and admitted it in private. Also that the article looked at primary sources, and saw that things that he said were not true. You're just making it look like the article is picking on a troubled, vulnerable person for being troubled and vulnerable, and ignoring the elements of the article inconvenient to that, such as the mild-mannered, introverted patient made disruptively ultra-sexual by L-dopa who had actually been an enthusiastic rapist and who no one described as shy and introverted. Or the audio recordings of a woman being told how she felt by him (and denying it), and how she was described that way in the books. Or how he put quotes from his own interests into his patients mouths. > there's very scant evidence If you ignore it, there isn't any. Do you think there's some threshold of quotes you're allowed to make up, or abilities you're allowed to give to people that they don't have (like the prime number thing, that even involved a fictional book), or a particular number of lies you get to tell about someone's past before it becomes dishonest? I have no idea what motivates people to make excuses like this for professional dishonesty. Sometimes I just think it's celebrity worship, but other times I think it's because people are dishonest in their own professional lives, and want to be excused by proxy.
- randycupertino 10mo agoAnother book I was recently sad to learn was at fabricated is The Salt Path, which was great but apparently based on lies, the author was fleeing debt and lawsuits and stole $86,000 from their previous employer prior the walk. What is super sad is they didn't pay the people back they stole money from after their book became a best seller: https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-path-how-the-couple-behind-a-bestseller-left-a-trail-of-debt-and-deceit https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-p... It's also became a movie staring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
- IAmBroom 10mo agoWow. Fascinating.
- dredmorbius 10mo agoThree Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin similarly: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Cups_of_Tea#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Cups_of_Tea#Controversy> Specific allegations and refutations were raised by 60 Minutes and The Daily Beast: <https://web.archive.org/web/20110416212133/http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/15/60minutes/main20054397.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20110416212133/http://www.cbsnew...> <https://web.archive.org/web/20110424154702/https://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/20110418/ts_dailybeast/13577_mansurkhanmahsudgregmortensonisaliar https://web.archive.org/web/20110424154702/https://news.yaho...>
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- dang 10mo ago(I wanted to put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204853 in the second chance pool* but it was too old, so I spawned a new copy of the submission and moved the (relevant) comments hither. I hope that's ok as a technical workaround... * explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
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- Angostura 10mo agoI rather liked Private Eye’s spoof Sacks book title many years ago: “The Man Who Mistook his Patients for a Publishing Opportunity”
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- lloydjones 10mo agoI feel that his pretentious, overwrought and unctuous writing was perhaps all because of an emptiness or inadequacy… His final years as a nice old gay man seem much more _normal_ and real, and he seems less of a fantasist at that stage…
- jtrn 10mo agoI disregarded everything from him after I read two of his books. It’s not perfect, but my rule of thumb is simple: If a scientific story feels sexy, cinematic, and narratively perfect, it’s likely fabrication. Same reason I have been skeptical towards dark energy, EMDR, and the blue light destroys sleep craze. And many other stupid stuff. If you like a story or a finding, that’s a clue to double the critical sceptisism.
- Veen 10mo agoI'd always assumed that the patients in Sacks' books were lightly fictionalized composites that combined interesting features from multiple cases. The purpose being to illustrate conditions and aspects of human psychology for a general readership. Since they weren't presented as rigorous case studies, I didn't take them to be that. I find what Sacks did much less irksome than more recent psychological and social studies books that pretend to be presenting rigorous scientific fact when they are, in fact, tendentious bullshit.
- jtrn 10mo agoI apply the same criteria to any scientific assent. What is the actual practical / clinical relevance? And is it properly studied without p-hacking, correlation/causation confusion and without signs of bias. Following these criteria, 95% of studies are useless, and strangely these overlap massively with the ones that fail to replicate. Yet I get constantly shit on for having too high standards for scientific rigor.
- duskdozer 10mo agoEMDR has obvious problems, but I'm curious why you're putting blue light in the same category? It has clear and plausible physical MOA eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-04054-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-04054-9
- squeefers 10mo agoim similarly dubious about this.... only works by blue light hitting your retina, which meant your eye was open, which meant you were awake ie not even trying to sleep. also, circadian rhythms were proven to be unaffected even when living in a cave with no natural sunlight - so theres more to sleepiness than just light hitting your eyebaws
- abstractspoon 10mo agoAnyone seeking fame must be considered suspect