10:31 AM ET 08/20/98

FEATURE-Dr. Sacks, explorer of the human mind and heart
By Arthur Spiegelman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As a doctor, writer and explorer of
the mind and heart, Oliver Sacks visits the far reaches of human
existence -- places where the senses go askew, men mistake their
wives for hats and the deaf go blind.
            Sacks, a warm and humane doctor but a self-proclaimed
solitary man, is the author of several highly successful books
including ``Awakenings,'' where he recounts how as a young
doctor in a hospital for forgotten patients in the Bronx he
discovered victims of sleeping sickness and brought them awake
with a new drug -- only to watch them sink back into their
catatonia.
            ``Awakenings'' was made into two films, one a documentary
that very few people have seen and the other a movie starring
Robin Williams as Sacks that won critical praise even as Sacks
insisted that Williams did not ape his every gesture and had
protected his privacy by using a different name in the film.
            Now, starting on Aug. 25, neurologist Sacks, hailed as a
''Hero of the Hopeless'' and ``Explorer of the Human Mind,''
adds an unlikely stint as TV star to his resume with an
emotionally powerful PBS series called ``Oliver Sacks: The Mind
Traveller.''
            It is a most unusual role for the British-born, raised and
educated doctor who, enamored of motorcycles, took to the
California mountains about 40 years ago and wound up as a
medical adviser to a biker gang of Hells Angels.
            ``It was rather interesting and moving to see their
brotherhood and it was also rather frightening to see so much
unan talks through touch to another victim of that devastating syndrome,
a man who has lost both his sight and his hearing.
            Like the rest of the series, the first part, called ``The
Ragin' Cajun,'' is a tribute to the human spirit and its scene
of the deaf-blind man dancing and being touched by others is a
soaring bit of filmmaking.
            Sacks has written frequently of people who see voices (the
deaf) and feel them as well (the deaf-blind) and has spent much
time with victims of Usher's Syndrome, an inheritable disease
that has many victims in the bayous of Louisiana.
            ``If you offered a person born deaf hearing he would
probably not accept, because what you have never had you can't
conceive or yearn for and because you have created your own
world without it,'' Sacks said.
            ``When I asked the color-blind if they wanted color, they
could not imagine what I was talking about, and I remember one
man saying to me, 'Do you want X-ray vision?' and I said I was
fine as I am and he said 'So am I,''' Sacks recalled.
            But he added this is not the case with people born with
Usher's Syndrome, who know from birth that they are not only
deaf but will go blind.

            A TRAGIC FATE
            ``They know this is going to be their fate and it is
unbearably poignant. I remember one woman touching bubbles and
saying, 'I want to carry this memory into the darkness.'''
           In other episodes, Sacks visits the world of color-blind
people on a Pacific atoll and talks to victims of autism who
defy their condition by painting and even, in one case, getting
a PhD and becoming a leading expert in cattle care.
            The public television series shows just the tip of the
iceberg of Sacks' mind-traveling. He has also found people with
no language at all who communicate only by gesture and has
studied a fatal disease on the island of Guam that probably is
borne by the seeds of a primitive tree, a disease that he says
if properly studied might help explain Alzheimer's Disease.
            He has also written of a man so neurologically impaired that
he mistook his wife for a hat, a case that became the title of
one of Sacks' best-selling books.
            While some critics see Sacks as a pioneer in the study of
human heroism -- people coping and in many cases triumphing over
devastating illnesses -- others call his work ``Sacks' Freak
Show.''
            ``I get upset when people talk of 'Sacks' Freak Show.' It
makes me chill and seethe with anger. My central feeling is one
of respect for these people for making a life,'' he said.
            ``It is fascinating to see people's power to create lives
and selves from a different viewpoint. I felt this strongly with
the color-blind world and that wonderful community of the deaf
in  Seattle (where Cajun cook Delcambre settled).''
            PBS made seven episodes of ``The Mind Traveller'' but is
showing only four. Sacks thinks that if the show is a success
there could be a second season, in which he hopes the original
documentary film of ``Awakenings'' could be shown.

 ^REUTERS@
--
Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada
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