Why did I believe Oliver Sacks?
5Taylor G. Lunt
2avturchin
3Raphael Roche
3cata
2Shankar Sivarajan
New Comment
What claims were fabricated, specifically? It seems like mostly minor stuff. As in, a man with visual agnosia probably did mistake very different objects, like his wife or his hat, though maybe Sacks created that specific situation where he mistook his wife for his hat just for dramatic effect. It's shitty that he would do that, but I still feel that whatever I believed after reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat I was probably right to believe, because the major details are probably true?
1I think that the case of twins who generated prime numbers is a serious one. This leads us to overestimation of human brain capabilities. I used to be skeptical about it and was criticize for not believing.
I think that we may be tempted to justify our adherence to Sacks's narrative by nice arguments like his reading feels honest and convincing. However it is plausibility a rationalization avoiding to acknowledge much more common and boring reasons such as we have a strong prior because 1) it's a book 2) it's a best seller 3) the author is a physician 4) the patients were supposed to be known to other physicians, nurses, etc 5) and yes, as you also pointed out, we already know that neurology is about crazy things. So overall the prior is high that the book tells the truth even before we open it. That's said, I really love Oliver Sacks's books.
I was under the impression that Oliver Sacks was well regarded among his professional colleagues, so he wouldn't just make up a bunch of important stuff out of whole cloth.
I have read about people who were skeptical of the substance of the Phineas Gage story too (i.e. that he had this big involuntary personality shift after his injury.)
I thought the cases in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat were obviously as fictionalized as an episode of House: the condition described is real and based on an actual case, but the details were made up to make the story engaging. But I didn't read it in 1985 when it was published. Did people back then take statements like "based on a true story" more seriously?