First the new book
The book I have been
reading recently is Admissions, a Life in
Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh, published this year by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
I read the first part of his autobiography, Do No Harm, when it came out in
2014 and I was thrilled to find the second part while I was travelling this
summer, it is in that lovely big airport paperback format too which is even better!
Admissions is in my opinion just as interesting as Do No Harm.
Here is a paragraph from
Admissions, in a section of the book where Henry Marsh was recalling how he feels while watching young inexperienced surgeons operating, that caused me to mark the page as I was
reading –
“But it is very easy to under estimate the
importance of endless practice with practical skills. You learn them by doing,
much more than by knowing. It becomes what psychologists call implicit memory. When we learn a new
skill the brain has to work hard – it is a consciously directed process
requiring frequent repetition and the expenditure of energy. But once it is
learnt, the skill – the motor and sensory coordination of muscles by the brain –
becomes unconscious, fast and efficient.”
References
Admission Weidenfeld and Nicolson,2017, ISBN 978-1-4746-0589-2
Do No Harm Weidenfeld and Nicolson, ISBN-10: 0297869876
I was reminded on Monday of the posting below that is about another of my
favourite writers.
I have just copied and pasted it here with no editing so I hope it keeps it’s
format and that there are not too many mistakes!
I need to add to the list of Oliver Sacks books on my shelf that comes on the bottom of the blog –
On the Move
Gratitude
and
25 Life Changing Lessons that Will Inspire You
23rd
October 2011
An open letter to Dr Oliver Sacks
"The Blue Dog Who Mistook Himself for a Gentleman"
by Susie Mallett, 1998
Dear Dr Sacks,
I have read many books of your books, I think probably bought everything that you have written, since I first discovered The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, in 1986.
I
had been an art student, but by the time that I read this book of yours
I was already working as an art therapist. Still, I think that I bought
that book for its wonderful cover, an illustration by Paul Slater after
a favourite Magritte painting of mine, The Treachery of Images, rather than
for its contents. At that time I knew absolutely nothing about you and
your work, or your delightful way of describing it all.
Since
that first reading of that “Magritte book” I was hooked and I have been
buying your books regularly ever since. Now I buy for the content not
because of my attraction for the covers! I must admit, though, that
sometimes it is the mind-catching titles that first attract me. An Anthropologist on Mars could not be left un-purchased, and My Mind’s Eye caught my eye immediately last weekend, at the railway station. Even without opening it I just knew that I had to read it.
Each
time that I have seen a new publication with your name on it I have
bought it, even if you are mentioned only because you have written the
Foreward.
I
am at this moment in time enthralled by your descriptions of
stereoscopy and prosopagnosia in my latest discovery. I am amazed,
although I am not really sure why I should be, at how much insight your
words are giving me into the problems of the nine-year old
spastic-diplegic children and the sixty-year old stroke victims who are
among my present clients and the problems that they have with their own
visional interpretations of their worlds.
I
am not sure whether they have exactly the problems that you are
describing, but even so my eyes are opening even wider to all the
possibilities that I must take into account when I work with them.
As
I wended my way to work this morning, reading your book as I walked and
writing notes in my head at the same time, I was thinking about you and
how you bring your own personal experiences into your writing to help
describe your client’s problems and their roads to recovery.
It
was while walking to work and having so many parallel thoughts that I
decided to write this sort of imaginary letter to you. I got out a
pencil and paper and began straight away, with the autumn sun on my head
and the crunching leaves below my feet.
I
was thinking about how you probably would have been lost by now if you
had walked from the bus-stop to work with your nose in a book, so
appalling is your sense of direction. More important were my thoughts
about how inspiring your writing is for me. I expect that it inspires
many others too.
I
walked into the room where I was going to work this morning and
immediately announced to my colleagues that they really would have to
find your book in whatever language was easiest for them, (I am English,
my colleagues are German and Hungarian and we work in Germany). I
believe that even if they only read the middle part of The Mind’s Eye they would learn a lot more about and reach clearer understandings of their clients.
I realised a long
time ago that I benefit not only from the information that is in your
books but also that the style in which you express it has influenced,
motivated and inspired me most of all for so many years.
I
wrote my first case-study when I was a newly fledged teacher in
Basingstoke in 1988. The report was later praised for its precise detail
by my head-teacher, who had needed it for a local-authority decision on
a child’s placement.
That report was written three years after I had read The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
It was a few years later, when I was writing about my observations in
conductive settings, that I realised that I actually enjoyed writing
these down and that really what I was doing was painting pictures with
words, in a way similar to you do in your wonderful case studies.
Now,
twenty-five years after reading that book and more than twenty since I
wrote that first case-study, I am enjoying writing my blog and still
being inspired by your books.
Thank you Dr Sacks, I hope there will be many more case-studies and books to come.
Susie Mallett
Conductor
Notes
René Magritte – The Treachery (Betrayal) of Images:
Dr Oliver Sacks -
His books in my library –
Migraine
Awakenings
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
A Leg to Stand On
An Anthropologist on Mars
Seeing Voices
Island of the Colorblind
Uncle Tungsten
Oaxaca Journal
Musicophilia
The Mind’s Eye
With a Foreward by Dr. Oliver Sacks - Phantoms in the Brain by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
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