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Reading Group Discussion Questions—An Anthropologist on Mars 1. Are Reading Group Discussion Questions—An Anthropologist on Mars 1. Are we capable of dominating our mind? If the answer is yes, why is it that in general we have a guilt sentiment? and why is it that in "An Anthropologist on Mars" the people described do not have control over their actions, cognitions and feelings and their mind is a "subject of their brain" which then takes total control? So is it accurate to say that the mind only has power over us if there is a mental problem or emotional conflict or some kind of punishment involved? 2. On page 109 Oliver Sacks affirms that "A neurologists life is not systematic, like a scientists', but it provides him with novel and unexpected situations which can become windows, peepholes, into the intricacy of nature--an intricacy which one might not anticipate from the ordinary course of life." Even though this statement is placed within the case of "To See and Not See" what does this mean, and what does it reveal about how Oliver Sacks studies behavior and brain function? 3. Do you agree with the statement "The Self is not something you find, it is something you create." Do you think people with autism have a sense of self? How do you know? Who creates it and why? 4. The tale titled To See and Not See in An Anthropologist on Mars, talks about a man who regains his vision after almost half a century of not seeing. Do you believe there is any way a person can skillfully master a sense that has been dormant for so long? Is this success or failure evidence of the power of adaptation (or lack thereof) in human beings? 5. After reading the story "Prodigies" from Anthropologist on Mars, would you like to be a prodigy? Oliver Sacks Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England into a family of physicians and scientists (his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner). He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen’s College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist. In July of 2007, he was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university’s first Columbia University Artist. In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L- dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (“A Kind of Alaska”) and the Oscar- nominated feature film (“Awakenings”) with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease. He has investigated the world of Deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and his most recent books are Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind’s Eye (2010). Sacks’s work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru. .
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