Man Who Mistook A Hat

Since the beginning of science the brain has been a mysterious curiosity to man. The term “neuroscience” only dates back to the 1970’s, but the study of the brain began not too long after figuring out what science was. As technology has progressed over time, neuroscience has undergone significant changes to become what it has today. New findings and discoveries are always changing what we know, or what we think we know, about the brain. In the collection of stories by Oliver Sack entitled, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, we see those with neurological diseases suffering, with their attempts to cope these diseases and the conclusions that Dr. Sacks makes on their conditions. Dr. Sacks is the physician in all the narratives that tell about his studies of patients with the neurological deficits. Sack’s is not

P is a patient whose case negates one of the fundamental laws of classical neurology: that any brain damage will reduce or remove the ability of an individual to think in abstract or categorical ways. Dr. P, on that contrary side, has lost instead all ability to recognize the individual and the concrete. While looking at a picture, he attends to color or shape but not to the picture as a whole. The animal mind does perceive from the five senses, but in general humans tend to look at a whole picture to recognize an object. For Dr. P it takes time to process and perceive the entire image. Given a red rose, he comments on it for its length, color, shape and size but Dr. P. cannot be entirely sure until he smells it. He is unaware of anything unusual in his method of perception. As the title of this piece suggests, because of a similarity in size and shape, he is even capable of mistaking his wife’s head for a hat. Cognitive science is a new discipline that began in the 1950’s, so there is bound to be new discoveries and such cases as Dr. P.’s call into question established ideas about the brain and its