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 [log in to unmask] ^^^ \ / \ | / Today’s Research \\ | // ...Tomorrow’s Cure \ | / \|/ ```````