Posted by barry-cotter 5 days ago
> Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2025, issue, with the headline “Mind Over Matter.”
and a headline like that (saying nothing) would be more appropriate to this.
The very fact that Sacks wrote about his patients has always had its detractors—based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, someone called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”—but what was surprising (to me) from this article is that it seems that after that early book, he actually became careful not to exaggerate or make up stories, to the extent that someone closely following him looking for discrepancies was not able to find any. I would have expected the stories to be mostly fictional, but it appears that this is so only of his early books.
what exactly was I supposed to find and see people believe?
Anyway sorry I didn't keep track of the pages I visited, but here are some of the search results I see now, indicating at least some time wasted exploring something that did not need to be explored if it had been clear that the story was not fully real:
- https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/isoc/twins....
- https://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/yamaguchi.htm
- https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and... (pretty good article!)
- https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2005-42-01/S0273-0979-04-0... (mention by Granville!)
- https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/09/possibly-re...
- https://www.discovermagazine.com/oliver-sacks-and-the-amazin...
- https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/prime-numbers-mental-calcula...
BTW the same account of the twins (https://archive.is/MmogP) also has several paragraphs revealing major misunderstandings on the part of Sacks, e.g.:
> And yet they are called “calendar calculators”—and it has been inferred and accepted, on next to no grounds, that what is involved is not memory at all, but the use of an unconscious algorithm for calendar calculations. When one recollects how even Carl Friedrich Gauss, at once one of the greatest of mathematicians, and of calculators too, had the utmost difficulty in working out an algorithm for the date of Easter, it is scarcely credible that these twins, incapable of even the simplest arithmetical methods, could have inferred, worked out, and be using, such an algorithm.
[Needless to say, calculating the day of the week for a fixed date is a much easier and completely unrelated problem to that of Easter, “the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon (a mathematical approximation of the first astronomical full moon, on or after 21 March” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter ]
Same reason I have been skeptical towards dark energy, EMDR, and the blue light destroys sleep craze. And many other stupid stuff. If you like a story or a finding, that’s a clue to double the critical sceptisism.
And a note: EMDR works MUCH better than blue-light-reducing therapy. It's just that the theory for WHY it works is insane (integration of memories/thoughts across brain hemispheres is facilitated by moving eyes back and forth). It's just exposure therapy, and the "follow the light" stuff is just structuring the exposure setting. You get the same effect while doing exposure therapy while driving a car.
not necessarily - your eyelids aren't perfectly opaque
>also, circadian rhythms were proven to be unaffected even when living in a cave with no natural sunlight - so theres more to sleepiness than just light hitting your eyebaws
yeah, not disputing this. Blue light doesn't have to be the sole determinant to have an effect though
Added: ok, found a more careful description. https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and...
While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.
Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.
Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
Also a very notable statistic/anecdote at the end. I don't know how wide the scope (only one university?), but about a third of the incoming neurology students chose the field because of Oliver Sacks.
I always found the bulk of the criticism leveled against him to be faulty. However, if he did indeed fabricate a lot of details - it is concerning.
* explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
This is a remarkable sentence, and it appears suddenly in the article without context or explanation.
Naturally, there are questions. Was it necessarily orange jello? Does orange refer to the flavor or the color? What property of this particular jello made it preferable to other flavors and colors of jello? Did he prepare the jello for this particular purpose, or did he have other uses for the orange jello? What were they? Did he reuse jello or discard it after one use? Most important though: why would he do this??
The article does not say.
<https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/what-are-whipp...>
Context was a stage performance (not by Devo) roughly 20 years ago, referring to late 1970s / early 1980s youth culture. The song itself was released in 1980:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/orange-fruit-color-ori...
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-p...
It's also became a movie staring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Cups_of_Tea#Controversy>
Specific allegations and refutations were raised by 60 Minutes and The Daily Beast:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20110416212133/http://www.cbsnew...>
<https://web.archive.org/web/20110424154702/https://news.yaho...>
In 1981 Gould accused Morton of fabricating details. Gould died 20 years after that. Nine years after Gould died, some said Morton had not fabricated details.
I should add Morton was a phrenologist who did not believe in common descent.
I know the underpowered studies cited in Thinking Fast and Slow didn't replicate but I don't think there was any fabrication?
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/09/14/highly-criticized-pap...
https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...