Oliver Sacks's Blog

It’s hard to believe that Oliver Sacks left “this mortal coil” ten years ago, but we are proud and thrilled to report that his legacy is stronger—and more important—than ever. His values of respect and understanding for every individual are timeless. Immersing oneself in an Oliver Sacks book, especially in these times of uncertainty and strife around the globe, reminds us of the profound wonders and powers of nature and the human mind.

Here are some highlights of our work at the Oliver Sacks Foundation over the past decade (you can find much more across our website):

New books by Oliver Sacks: Gratitude, The River of Consciousness, Everything in its Place, Letters. Old books in beautiful new editions: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, A Leg to Stand On.

A podcast: Radiant Minds: The World of Oliver Sacks, a nine-part series investigating the powers of neurodivergent minds via Audible.com

A PBS American Masters documentary: Oliver Sacks: His Own Life by Emmy-winning director Ric Burns.

A new season of Brilliant Minds, the NBC drama based on Dr. Sacks’s life and work, starring Zachary Quinto. Back by popular acclaim, season two debuts September 22, 2025. (You still have time to catch up on season one streaming on Peacock!)

Your support—intellectual, moral, or financial—for our mission is crucial. Together we are stronger, and we love hearing your stories. How has Dr. Sacks’s work influenced your life? Did you ever meet him in person? Which is your favorite book?

Thanks as ever for being part of our world. Cheers to you!

Sincerely,

Kate, Greg, and Abi

The Sacks Team

Top photo: Throughout his long and productive life, Oliver Sacks never stopped listening (Courtesy of the Oliver Sacks Foundation).

The post The Legacy Of Oliver Sacks appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

Do you remember where you first heard about Oliver Sacks? Chances are pretty good it was on public television or radio. Perhaps on Science Friday or Radiolab? Morning Edition? A Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross? For so many of us, life without NPR or PBS is impossible to imagine, but we cannot take it for granted.

Public media was important to Dr. Sacks on a personal level. He listened to his local classical station, WQXR, as he wrote each day. In the evenings he often tuned in to “Nova” or a David Attenborough documentary. (He rarely switched to commercial television, but made an exception for “Star Trek.”)

Top image: Oliver Sacks with Ira Flatow, host of Science Friday. Here are four minutes of video from Science Friday guaranteed to make you smile, featuring Oliver giving a tour of his desk.

To the left he is pictured with Robert Krulwich, the host of Radiolab, who had been interviewing Oliver since the mid 1980s.

If you depend on your favorite show or podcast to learn about the world and your fellow humans and other creatures, please, please call your representatives in DC right now and tell them how you feel about this essential lifeline to education and source of community news. Here’s how you can find their numbers. Call them often. It’s that important.

You can also use a form to send your congress member an email about this issue here. To help public media directly, you can donate to support PBS here, and NPR here.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, consider forwarding it to a friend who would also like to help!

The post Support Public Media Before It’s Gone appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

From Letters to Gratitude, and from Awakenings to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, here’s a selection of Oliver Sacks books that might make good gifts for people on your list this year.

Letters

The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species, revealing his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades, collected here for the first time.

“Oliver Sacks’s Letters isn’t a book of the year – it’s a book for a lifetime. The great neurologist’s brilliance and humanity is no secret; but here (superbly edited by Kate Edgar) the reader sees his life unfold in real time: his original, challenging work, his love for his family, his unique passions, his evolving relationship to his sexuality.” —Erica Wagner, The New Statesman

BUY BOOKGratitude

Reflections on what it means to live a good and worthwhile life. These four essays–which went viral when first published in the New York Times–form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being. Now updated with a gorgeous new cover.

My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” —Oliver Sacks

BUY BOOKAwakenings

The classic account of survivors of the encephalitic lethargica and their return to the world after decades of “sleep.” This book was the inspiration for the 1990 film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

“Awakenings came from the most intense medical and human involvement I have even know, as I encountered, lived with, these patients in a Bronx hospital, some of whom had been transfixed, motionless, in a sort of trance, for decades. Migraine was still in the medical canon, but here I took off in all directions–with allegory, philosophy, poetry, you name it.” — Oliver Sacks

BUY BOOKThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Shortly before he died, Dr. Sacks wrote an essay looking back on his seminal 1985 book. It appeared for the first time as the preface to this paperback edition, published in 2021.

“Short narratives, essays, parables about patients with a great range of neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions, written in a lighter, more informal style than I had ever used before. To my intense surprise (my publisher’s too!) this book hit some nerve in the reading public, and became an instant best-seller.” — Oliver Sacks

BUY BOOKBROWSE THE OLIVER SACKS COLLECTION

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Please join us to celebrate the publication of Letters, the new collection of Oliver Sacks’s correspondence! November 7, 2024, at 8 pm at 92Y in NYC (and online), with Zachary Quinto, Kay Redfield Jamison, Maria Popova, Wendy Lesser, Bill Hayes, Ira Flatow, Michael Grassi, and Kate Edgar.

Pioneering neurologist and bestselling author Oliver Sacks — a self-described “philosophical physician” and “neuropathological Talmudist” — was one of the great observers of the human mind in the modern era.

His writing captures the drama of medicine and science with the psychological precision and grace of a great literary stylist. And his writing was never more intimate and surprising than in his letters, now collected for the first time ever.

In celebration of their publication, hear a one-of-a-kind reading from these letters with acclaimed actor Zachary Quinto — who plays a neurologist inspired by Sacks in the new series Brilliant Minds — followed by a candid conversation with award-winning writers Kay Redfield Jamison, Maria Popova, Wendy Lesser, journalist Ira Flatow, Brilliant Minds showrunner Michael Grassi, and Sacks’ partner, Bill Hayes.

In correspondence with the likes of W.H. Auden, Bjork, Harold Pinter, David Remnick, Susan Sontag, Robin Williams, and dozens of other friends and fellow scientists, Sacks wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind — through his eyes, we see the beginnings of modern neuroscience, following the thought processes of one of the great intellectuals of our time. Don’t miss Quinto, Popova, Lesser, Flatow, Jamison, Hayes, and Grassi as they bring these letters to life.

GET TICKETS

The post The Letters of Oliver Sacks: A Reading and Conversation appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

We are thrilled to share the news that the New York Public Library has acquired the Oliver Sacks archive, including a vast array of annotated manuscripts, books, letters, photographs, and memorabilia that Dr. Sacks amassed over his lifetime.

This beautiful piece in the New York Times describes some of the individual items in the Sacks archive, and it quotes Julie Golia, NYPL’s associate director of archives, manuscripts and rare books, who says:

“One of the things that is really powerful to me about this collection is the role that Sacks played almost as an archivist of the experiences of people who were neurodiverse, using their words, preserving their words, listening with nuance to their wishes about how to tell their stories…. Sacks is one of the most important humanists of the 20th and 21st century.”

Sacks in London in 1958. As a young man, he was an avid powerlifter, and in 1961 set a California state record with a 600-pound back squat. Oliver Sacks Foundation via The New York Times

“The Oliver Sacks Foundation is thrilled to have Oliver Sacks’s archives, including drafts of his books and papers, his extensive correspondence with leading figures in science, medicine, and the arts find their ideal home: The New York Public Library.”         — Orrin Devinsky, President of the Oliver Sacks Foundation

Notes on patients with encephalitis lethargica, which Sacks wrote about in his book “Awakenings.” Oliver Sacks Foundation

Also in the Sacks archive:

Hundreds of handwritten notebooks and journals, as well as audio journals kept by Sacks over a span of more than sixty yearsHandwritten and typed manuscripts for all 16 books and every major article and essay written by Sacks, accompanied by drafts, notes, revisions, proofs, and galleysResearch and subject files reflecting Sacks’s wide-ranging interests and vast intellectual curiosity, covering topics as diverse as aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming, and twinsNearly 35,000 letters exchanged with friends, family, patients, colleagues, and fans, including W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Francis Crick, Harold Pinter, Robert Silvers, and Susan SontagThousands of photographs relating to Sacks’s life and work, including hundreds taken by Sacks himself.

A page of notes titled “Motorbikes,” made while writing his 2015 memoir “On the Move,” which opens with his childhood longing for “ease of movement and superhuman power.” Oliver Sacks Foundation

It’s a giant collection and will take several years to catalog and process; the library plans to open the Oliver Sacks papers to researchers by 2028. But you can read the best of Dr. Sacks’s correspondence in a short few weeks, with the publication of LETTERS, a selection of correspondence curated by Kate Edgar that illuminates his deepest thoughts on music, art, and science, friendship and resilience, and what it takes to lead a meaningful life.

PREORDER NOW

Tickets are now on sale for a special event celebrating the publication of LETTERS. Join Zachary Quinto, Bill Hayes, Kay Redfield Jamison, Maria Popova, Wendy Lesser, Ira Flatow, Michael Grassi, and Kate Edgar for a reading and conversation at the 92Y, November 7, 2024 at 7 pm. Live and online!

GET TICKETS

The post The Oliver Sacks archive heads to the New York Public Library appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

Hello, and happy September!

If you were watching the Olympics a few weeks ago, you may have seen ads for the new television series inspired by Oliver Sacks’s work, coming to NBC on September 23. We are so excited to share this with you!

In Brilliant Minds, Zachary Quinto plays a modern-day neurologist in a Bronx hospital who bears (so many!) similarities to Oliver Sacks (and a few differences…). We love that this new drama does exactly what Dr. Sacks’s case histories do: it explores the mysteries of the most complex thing in the universe, the human brain. It reminds us that we are all uniquely individual, and that we all deserve respect and care. It puts patients first. And it reminds us that doctors and their colleagues are human beings just like the rest of us. Read more about the show here.

As you watch the series unfold, see if you can recognize the cases. (Hint: many of them are from The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat or An Anthropologist on Mars, but lots are from the inspired brain of showrunner Michael Grassi and his team of writers.) For those who know a little about Oliver’s own life, there are many easter eggs. We’re not telling, but see if you can spot them. We will be running book giveaways on our social channels for best replies! Follow us on Instagram and Twitter to stay connected.

Brilliant Minds debuts Monday nights at 10pm in most markets, beginning September 23, 2024. It will also be available to stream on Peacock. See you there! For now, it’s available in the U.S. and Canada. We will be sure to let you know as other countries are added.

STREAM SHOW

The post Brilliant Minds: A New TV Show Based on Oliver Sacks appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

Hello, and happy September!

If you were watching the Olympics a few weeks ago, you may have seen ads for the new television series inspired by Oliver Sacks’s work, coming to NBC on September 23. We are so excited to share this with you!

In Brilliant Minds, Zachary Quinto plays a modern-day neurologist in a Bronx hospital who bears (so many!) similarities to Oliver Sacks (and a few differences…). We love that this new drama does exactly what Dr. Sacks’s case histories do: it explores the mysteries of the most complex thing in the universe, the human brain. It reminds us that we are all uniquely individual, and that we all deserve respect and care. It puts patients first. And it reminds us that doctors and their colleagues are human beings just like the rest of us. Read more about the show here.

As you watch the series unfold, see if you can recognize the cases. (Hint: many of them are from The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat or An Anthropologist on Mars, but lots are from the inspired brain of showrunner Michael Grassi and his team of writers.) For those who know a little about Oliver’s own life, there are many easter eggs. We’re not telling, but see if you can spot them. We will be running book giveaways on our social channels for best replies! Follow us on Instagram and Twitter to stay connected.

Brilliant Minds debuts Monday nights at 10pm in most markets, beginning September 23, 2024. It will also be available to stream on Peacock. See you there! For now, it’s available in the U.S. and Canada. We will be sure to let you know as other countries are added.

STREAM SHOW

The post A New TV Show Based on Oliver Sacks appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

Today would have been Oliver Sacks’s 91st birthday, and we want to celebrate by sharing the cover of his forthcoming book with you. This charming, never-before-seen photo of Oliver was taken in 1997 by his good friend Rosalie Winard, a few blocks from his home on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.Oliver Sacks’s LETTERS, full of his deepest thoughts on music, art, and science, friendship and resilience, and what it takes to lead a meaningful life, will be available on November 5.Kate Edgar, director of the Oliver Sacks Foundation, said “Having spent the better part of forty years working side by side with Oliver Sacks as his researcher and editor on sixteen books, I thought I knew a lot about his life—but delving into his correspondence for this volume has been for me a fascinating journey, revealing many new aspects of a truly remarkable man.”

(Cover Design by Chip Kidd)

Preorder now

The post Happy birthday, Oliver appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

We are thrilled to share the official trailer and photos of Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf in NBC’s new medical drama Brilliant Minds.

Inspired by case histories in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, the show follows a revolutionary, larger-than-life neurologist and his team of interns as they explore the last great frontier — the human mind — while grappling with their own relationships and mental health.

Coming this fall from writer and executive producer Michael Grassi, the cast includes Zachary Quinto, Tamberla Perry, Ashleigh LaThrop, Alex MacNicoll, Aury Krebs, Spence Moore II, Teddy Sears, and Donna Murphy. Premieres on Monday September 23 at 10 PM.

Official TrailerProduction Photos

Brilliant Minds “Pilot” Episode 101 — Pictured: (l-r) Ashleigh LaThrop as Dr. Ericka Kinney, Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, Alex MacNicoll as Dr. Van Markus, Kira Guloien as Hanna Peters, Aury Krebs as Dr. Dana Dang, Spence Moore II as Dr. Jacob Nash (Photo by: Rafy/NBC)

Brilliant Minds “Pilot” Episode 101 — Pictured: Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf — (Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC)

Brilliant Minds “Chapter Two: The Disembodied Woman” Episode 102 — Pictured: (l-r) Aury Krebs as Dr. Dana Dang, Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, Alex MacNicoll as Dr. Van Markus, Ashleigh LaThrop as Dr. Ericka Kinney, Spence Moore II as Dr. Jacob Nash — (Photo by: Rafy/NBC)

Top image: Brilliant Minds “Pilot” Episode 101 — Pictured: Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf — (Photo by: Rafy/NBC)

LEARN MORE

The post Zachary Quinto stars as Dr. Oliver Wolf in Brilliant Minds appeared first on Oliver Sacks | Official Website of Author, Neurologist & Foundation.

We are thrilled to share a first look at photos of Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf in NBC’s new medical drama Brilliant Minds.

Inspired by case histories in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, the show follows a revolutionary, larger-than-life neurologist and his team of interns as they explore the last great frontier — the human mind — while grappling with their own relationships and mental health.

Coming this fall from writer and executive producer Michael Grassi, the cast includes Zachary Quinto, Tamberla Perry, Ashleigh LaThrop, Alex MacNicoll, Aury Krebs, Spence Moore II, Teddy Sears, and Donna Murphy. Stay tuned for more updates over the coming months!

Brilliant Minds “Pilot” Episode 101 — Pictured: (l-r) Ashleigh LaThrop as Dr. Ericka Kinney, Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, Alex MacNicoll as Dr. Van Markus, Kira Guloien as Hanna Peters, Aury Krebs as Dr. Dana Dang, Spence Moore II as Dr. Jacob Nash (Photo by: Rafy/NBC)

Brilliant Minds “Pilot” Episode 101 — Pictured: Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf — (Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC)

Brilliant Minds “Chapter Two: The Disembodied Woman” Episode 102 — Pictured: (l-r) Aury Krebs as Dr. Dana Dang, Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, Alex MacNicoll as Dr. Van Markus, Ashleigh LaThrop as Dr. Ericka Kinney, Spence Moore II as Dr. Jacob Nash — (Photo by: Rafy/NBC)

Top image: Brilliant Minds “Pilot” Episode 101 — Pictured: Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf — (Photo by: Rafy/NBC)

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