On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far,”

“Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far,”

There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way.

I do not know how much a propensity to addiction is “hardwired” or how much it depends on circumstances or state of mind. All I know is that I was hooked after that night with an amphetamine-soaked joint and was to remain hooked for the next four years. In the thrall of amphetamines, sleep was impossible, food was neglected, and everything was subordinated to the stimulation of the pleasure centers in my brain.

I was taking very heavy doses of amphetamines, and I became—psychotic? manic? disinhibited? enhanced? I hardly know what term to use, but it went with an extraordinary heightening of the sense of smell and of my normally unremarkable powers of imagery and memory.

PCP was originally introduced as an anesthetic in the 1950s but by 1965 was no longer in medical use because of its horrific side effects. Most hallucinogens have their primary effects on serotonin, one of the brain’s many neurotransmitters, but PCP, like ketamine, impairs the transmitter glutamine and is far more dangerous and long lasting in effect than other hallucinogens. It is known to cause structural lesions, as well as chemical changes, in the brains of rats.2 —

I never took amphetamines again—despite sometimes-intense longings for them (the brain of an addict or an alcoholic is changed for life; the possibility, the temptation, of regression never go away).

unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life.

A line from an Auden poem, “Let your last thinks all be thanks,”

At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.

“Every perception is an act of creation,” as Edelman says. As we move about, our sense organs take samplings of the world, and from these, maps are created in the brain. There then occurs with experience a selective strengthening of those mappings that correspond to successful perceptions—successful in that they prove the most useful and powerful for the building of “reality.”

in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.

people with amusia, who could not recognize any music;