On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

When the results were posted, I saw that I was ranked one from bottom in the class.

my mother was a natural storyteller. She would tell medical stories to her colleagues, her students, her patients, her friends. And she had told us—my three brothers and me—medical stories from our earliest days, stories sometimes grim and terrifying but always evocative of the personal qualities, the special value and valor, of the patient. My father, too, was a grand medical storyteller, and my parents’ sense of wonder at the vagaries of life, their combination of a clinical and a narrative cast of mind, were transmitted with great force to all of us.

He was fascinated to see how patients with parkinsonism, for example, unaware of their tendency to accelerate or to lean to one side, could become aware of it through viewing their own postures or gait on video—and learn measures to correct these.

People with Tourette’s are often unusually open to hypnosis and suggestion and disposed to involuntary repetition and imitation.

I wondered if his excessively vivid Tourettic imagination had crossed over into hallucination, conjuring up a phantom butterfly as real, perceptually, as an actual one.