Here’s a 1986 video with Oliver Sacks, where he discusses his work and his early book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
I found his description of his approach striking:
As a neurologist, as a physician one is concerned with patients and with people in jams, in predicaments. In particular predicaments that are being caused by their nervous system acting up, either their brain, their spinal cord, their peripheral nerves, maybe some disease, maybe some damage. As a neurologist you want to find out what exactly is the matter for the nervous system and what you can do about it, but you are equally concerned with the effect of this on the person, how it may alter their world, their inner experience and if need be, how they can cope best, live and survive in an altered world. And so this way you have to be equally sensitive and equally knowledgeable about the anatomy and the chemistry of the nervous system but also to all the things that make a life and make a world for an individual… One is rooted in the neurosciences at one end and in psychology and in phenomenology and in just what it is to be a person.
In some ways the patients I write of can seem very remote from ordinary life and from normality. But in other ways I think one can… I think as a physician one has to be able to, one has to try to imagine what it is like for them and enter into their situation and their world and relate it to one’s own.
That same impulse inspires neuroanthropology—the bringing together of our nervous systems, individual experience and coping, and our surrounding world, the consideration of the things that make a life. That really is the core of it.
What has changed in the twenty plus years since Sacks spoke is that we are now in the position to take this impulse and direct it into our scholarship. Rather than individual cases and rare neurological problems, we can now speak of establishing a field of inquiry that addresses how we are human through this synthesis.
So what has changed to make this possible? I see the development of four areas as making our work possible. Take one of these four away, and we probably wouldn’t be speaking about neuroanthropology right now. These bases make possible what we now want to do.
