Columns Columns Allyn Hunt Hallucinations: We all have them, say neurologists, but clearly politicians shouldn’t try to sell them as policies
Hallucinations: We all have them, say neurologists, but clearly politicians shouldn’t try to sell them as policies
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- Published on Friday, 09 November 2012 12:58
- Written by Allyn Hunt
“Hearing Things? Seeing Things? Many of Us Do?” was an Oliver Sacks’ article in the New York Times this week helping launch his book, “Hallucinations.” It points out that such phenomena are experienced by nearly all of us at some time in our lives – though we tend to keep that secret. Sacks is the much-acclaimed author, practitioner and professor of neurology and psychiatry, who has written 12 books regarding patients’ experiences with neurological disorders. His most well-known books: “Awakening” (made into a Oscar-nominated film, starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams), “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and “The Last Hippie,” also made into a film. He presently serves as both clinical professor of neurology and consulting neurologist at the center of the epilepsy at the New York University School of Medicine.
Possibly surprising some readers, the subject of his article was not about the seemingly endless and surreal U.S. political carnival in which one party persisted in running a campaign that insulted all who disagreed with the purity of extreme conservatism. That uncompromising political position embraced the denigration of the famous “47 percent” of the U.S. electorate, while attacking women’s reproductive freedom, indulging in fantasies about rape, and spouting poorly veiled species of racism. Tuesday’s re-election of Barak Obama surprised not a few on both sides by delivering such a denial to such hallucinations that many conservatives are calling for a retreat from such a rigidly hostile ideology.
Sacks, as a neurologist, of course deals with the disorder of hallucinations from a caregiver’s and medical researcher’s point of view. And unlike politically afflicted sufferers of this syndrome, his subjects are more modest and tolerant. Sacks provides convincing evidence that most hallucinating people (both the seemingly well and the unwell) go to great lengths to keep their condition secret.