Reddit mentions of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales is a fantastic series of real cases and a layman's explanation about what happened with people who had unusual mental situations. I really, really, really recommend it.

For example, people who have their perception of their body skewed, causing what is known as alien limb, where the limb you see attached to you does not seem to be your own, and sometimes tends to do things on its own because the feedback loop is broken. Those people tend to either amputate the limb or fall into extreme depression and end up taking their own life.

Edit: $11 bucks off amazon with prime for a paperback version. Linked to amazon smile version.

Edit 2: Another reccomendation by /u/pulgasvestidas link to post and Smile link to book

We seem to be programmed in our culture - perhaps by western religious and philosophical traditions - to accept dualism, which is the notion that mind and body are separate. However, several centuries of scientific progress have demonstrated more or less incontrovertibly the material basis of consciousness, thought, emotion, memory, and personality.

You ARE your brain. That is all there is to it.

What is particularly fascinating is how individual parts of the brain can be altered (i.e. damaged) with the result that parts of you are altered.

Oliver Sacks has several fascinating books that discuss case studies of neurological deficit, written for a popular audience, and they are each wonderful. Here are two of them:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

http://www.amazon.com/Anthropologist-Mars-Seven-Paradoxical-Tales/dp/0679756973/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319305698&sr=1-1

"The man who mistook his wife for a hat". Can't. Put. It. Down.

Texts and Reference Books

Days in the Lives of Social Workers

DSM-5

Child Development, Third Edition: A Practitioner's Guide

Racial and Ethnic Groups

Social Work Documentation: A Guide to Strengthening Your Case Recording

Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond

[Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life]
(https://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Feelings-Harbinger-Self-Help-Workbook/dp/1608822087/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3ZW7PRW5TK2PB0MDR9R3)

Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model

[The Clinical Assessment Workbook: Balancing Strengths and Differential Diagnosis]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0534578438/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_38?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ARCO1HGQTQFT8)

Helping Abused and Traumatized Children

Essential Research Methods for Social Work

Navigating Human Service Organizations

Privilege: A Reader

Play Therapy with Children in Crisis

The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives

The School Counseling and School Social Work Treatment Planner

Streets of Hope : The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood

Deviant Behavior

Social Work with Older Adults

The Aging Networks: A Guide to Programs and Services

[Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society: Bridging Research and Practice]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415884810/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change

Ethnicity and Family Therapy

Human Behavior in the Social Environment: Perspectives on Development and the Life Course

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

Generalist Social Work Practice: An Empowering Approach

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents

DBT Skills Manual

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets

Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need

Novels

[A People’s History of the United States]
(https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062397346/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511070674&sr=1-1&keywords=howard+zinn&dpID=51pps1C9%252BGL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch)


The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Life For Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Tuesdays with Morrie

The Death Class <- This one is based off of a course I took at my undergrad university

The Quiet Room

Girl, Interrupted

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Flowers for Algernon

Of Mice and Men

A Child Called It

Go Ask Alice

Under the Udala Trees

Prozac Nation

It's Kind of a Funny Story

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Bell Jar

The Outsiders

To Kill a Mockingbird

he's talking about a book
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

I'm not sure if this is exactly the kind of book you're looking for, but The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat has always been one of my favorites. I think it does a good job of walking through a lot of history and basic neuroscience in the context of some pretty bizarre neurological disorders. Here's a full text if you wanna give it a look.

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist who writes gripping nonfiction about bizarre conditions. Two great ones to check out are The Island of the Colorblind and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

I can't provide a detailed answer to this specific question (I doubt anyone can) but I can address a core confusion: This question assumes that all the information in the brain is accessible to all parts of a brain. In other words, it assumes that the mind is unitary.

This is not true.

The brain is made up of many modules, and most of them are outside conscious awareness. There are several examples of modules of the brain failing to share information, and even working at cross-purposes.

There's blindsight: A condition where people think they're blind but can respond to visual stimuli. By the questions logic, this shouldn't be possible: The brain is what sees, and the brain is what realizes whether it's seeing, so the brain should know it isn't blind.

The answer, of course, is that the part of the brain that's trying to figure out whether it's blind doesn't know about the existence of a visual path that evolved back in our proto-vertebrate days, but this visual path is still working fine.

Then there's the Cotard delusion, where living people believe they're dead. Again, since the brain knows what being dead means and the brain knows that the body is, for example, still breathing, the brain should be able to figure out it's still alive, right? Same answer: Modules not communicating.

You can magnify the effect by severing the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain. People whose corpus callosum has been cut are called split-brain patients, and experiments with split-brain patients have produced several instances of the left brain not knowing what the right is doing. Example. Another example.

And then, of course, there's hallucinations. And schizophrenia. How should it be possible for the brain to be tricked by images/sounds it produces itself? Because the module that's being tricked isn't the module that's producing the hallucinations.

Given all of this, is it really surprising that dreams can be surprising? There's a bunch of modules generating dreams, and a bunch of modules experiencing them. The first bunch feeds the dreams to the second bunch. The second bunch hasn't seen these dreams before, so it can be surprised if it sees something WTF-worthy.

To go deeper down the rabbit hole, see Michael Gazzaniga's first three Gifford lectures: 1 2 3, or read Oliver Sacks' The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

TL;DR: The mind's divided into modules; the modules that generate dreams aren't the same as the modules that experience them, so the latter can be surprised by what the former come up with.

You would appreciate anything by Oliver Sacks. He was a celebrated neurologist who wrote a bunch of great books about consciousness and fascinating stories about conditions he saw in his practice from a very philosophical rather than strictly clinical point of view. You could start with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Hallucinations, or Awakenings. He gave a nice TED talk if you want to get a taste for it.

Thanks.

And thank you for reminding me that I have the Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat tucked away in my room somewhere from when I entered Borders Books and Music™ at a weak moment and left with too many books to start at once. The Sacks book is now next in line, followed by Bowling Alone and Grand Theft Childhood.

Well this was an ... exuberant start to the episode. The song is "On My Radio" by The Selecter. There's a delightful music video for it. Jeff's musical choices are particularly peppy this week.

They're on segment overdrive! Things Dan Shouldn't Be Allowed to Complain About, Connor's Conundrums, Jeff Describes People -- even an Evernote update (Dan abandoned Evernote temporarily for some reason) and the riffed My Favorite Cereals.

Blindness + flight is a dealbreaker. I'd want to fly almost exclusively to see stuff. I'd pick blindness over deafness, though, because I couldn't do without music and the human voice in general. There's still the internet ... I'd have to give up gifs, though. I'd prefer losing my hearing over being born deaf because I could at least recall my favorite music and have an easier time speaking.

Siike returns! The procedure he's talking about is apparently called endovascular coiling, and the procedure is pretty fascinating. I'm kind of reminded of some patients in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, such as the titular man who couldn't identify everyday objects or people by sight. Great guest segment, of course.

I love Jeff's invocation of a centurion as a Hollywood archetype. It just puts the perfect picture in your head.

The metagaming discussion is taken up once more -- this time in gory detail. Their confusion is kind of amusing ... it's not the most difficult concept, especially for people who either are or work with actors.

Try this one -

Man who mistook his wife for a hat (Oliver Sacks)

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=oliver+sacks&qid=1558785421&s=gateway&sr=8-4

I have this sitting on my shelf waiting to be read

It was suggested reading for a Neuropsychology course that I had to drop.

I am super interested with no background too! I read Neuroscience For Dummies on my kindle. The format was a little wonky, so I recommend getting the paperback. It was interesting and a semi-easy read. I went to Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson and the topic was The Science of the Mind. It was great! I chatted with Cara Santa Maria and asked about her recommendations for interesting neuroscience books. She said I'd love The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. I've been meaning to read it! Also, checkout Amazon's best sellers in Neuroscience. Read reviews and see if they fit your interest. Let me know if you find anything interesting.

Si eu am kindle si vad ca primele 30 carti din el sunt numai de design si ceva self-help (Confessions of an introvert is quite good), plus ebook-urile /r/nosleep.

Citesc mai mult nonfictiune, beletristica rar, si mi-au placut teribil Fast Food Nation, Zero: The biography of a dangerous idea si The man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Si va urasc cu profilele si recomandarile voastre ca am ales deja 6 carti de la voi pe care vreau sa le citesc si n-am timp.

Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?

Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.

Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.

Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
   
3. Einstein: His Life and Universe
   
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
   
5. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
   
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
   
7. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
   
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
   
9. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
   
10. Cosmos
    
11. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    
12. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
    
13. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
    
14. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    
15. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow
    
17. Chaos: Making a New Science
    
18. Isaac Newton
    
19. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
    
20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
    
    And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.

If you're a Nick Hornby fan, here's what you should do - he's got three books that are little collections of the column he writes for The Believer called "Stuff I've Been Reading". They're hilarious, and each one gives you 5 or 6 great suggestions from a guy whose taste is pretty solid.

Start with The Polysyllabic Spree and then go to Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

He's always saying his favourite author is Anne Tyler - I can corroborate, she's pretty good.

This isn't really "literature" but you also might like Mil Millington. He's funny in the same way and even though as I'm reading I'm like "huh.. this isn't that great" his novels are the ones that I end up reading in one 8 hour sitting.

You might like David Sedaris - I'd start with Me Talk Pretty One Day

And someone else said John Irving - he's my very favourite.

A good psychology book (and I'm a major layperson, so it's definitely accessible) is The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Mad in America by Robert Whitaker.

The Professor and the Madman
http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0060839783/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398450830&sr=1-1&keywords=the+professor+and+the+madman
The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398450891&sr=1-1&keywords=the+man+who+mistook+his+wife+for+a+hat

Books like The Brain that Changes Itself, Phantoms in the Brain and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat are all really great reads. They're different cases and accounts of patients treated by the authors who are, I believe, neuroscientists and psychologists. I learned a LOT about how the brain works and relates to the body - but I'll warn you, when you see how flawed our perceptions of the world can be (how easily damaged, fooled or changed), you may have a slight existential crisis. I did. :)

The man who mistook his son for a hat.

Man who Mistook His Wife For a Hat - The great Oliver Sacks

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks is an interesting collection of case studies of people with unusual neurological conditions. Oliver Sacks is both a brilliant scientist and a great storyteller.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat

Any book that take a scientific look on how we perceive and integrate stimulu. (Here is my choice).

Any Oliver Sacks book. Understanding the broken brain is a very good tool to get the healthy one.(start with this one)

There is that Crash Course Psychology.

For me it's a good to understand what are attention and perception, what is it to learn and the importance of working memory. You can get all that without understanding memory, but it would be interesting to.

It can be cool to have a general idea of when our brain use shortcut because it's important not to waste energy.

And then for the social side of it welcome to the field of influence.

For a bit of history, the declassified documents are on the source section.

I'm subscribed to lots of book subreddits, so I assumed one of those... Saw it was askwomen and my first thought was "I bet Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman isn't on any of their lists." Thank you for proving me wrong! :-D


So for kicks, I'll recommend "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" to you. It's neurology case studies from Oliver Sacks (The doctor from Awakenings, played by Robin Williams), written for laymen. That shit is fascinating!

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. The writing is so good you won't care about the squeamish content.

The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum. A perfect blend of a historical retelling and science.

A Treasury of Deception by Michael Farguhar.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. Short stories of the mentally abnormal patients of Sacks.

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Taylor. Very good insight on what it is like to live with, and recover from brain damage. Also talks science about parts of the brain as a nice intro to the subject.

Mutants: On Genetic Variety in the Human Body by Armand Leroi.

And of course,
Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

Reefer Madness is about not only the causes behind marijuana being illegal, but also problems with migrant labor, and pornography.

Nickle and Dimed is about, basically, how minimum wage sucks a big fat one.

The Man who mistook his wife for a hat is about people with varying neurological disorders, and I think is just cool in general.

Not quite the same as your examples, but some of my favorite non-fiction science are...

The Coming Plague

And The Band Played On

The Disappearing Spoon

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

I could probably come up with a few others if any of these seem to be what interests you.

I don't think there will ever be a perfect rule that can be applied across all possibilities without fail, but for me one of the major things I look for is whether the author is a respected scientist actively working in the field (or, if they're retired, had an active history in the field).

So your Gazzaniga and Brown books I wouldn't even hesitate to recommend to others, without even having read them. It helps that I've read other books by those authors and their research, but their names alone are enough for me to give them a tick. Of course that doesn't guarantee that they're good books, but if you're asking for a rule on how to judge a book before reading it, then that's probably going to result in more success than failure.

The second thing I look for is whether the author has a history of writing polemics and intentionally controversial books in order to increase sales (a sort of "clickbait" approach to books), and whether their names are associated with criticism for misrepresenting basic issues in the areas they discuss. As such, people like Gladwell and Pinker would be ruled out by this.

>I'd also love to hear /r/skeptic 's suggestions for reading specifically about learning, drive, motivation, discipline...

My personal suggestions would be:

Understanding Behaviorism - William Baum (touches a little more on rigorous academic work rather than being a purely pop work, but still has some good pop chapters).

The Science of Self-Control - Howard Rachlin

Breakdown of Will - George Ainslie

Some related books but not directly on those topics:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks (It's a cliche suggestion but still a good book).

Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience - Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld (More methodological issues with neuroscience research and reporting).

Delusion of Gender - Cordelia Fine (Critical look at some of the research on gender differences).

Everything you will ever experience happens in your brain. Books by Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran are entertaining without being totally overrun by misrepresentations of science.

Two things, (1) I'm going to recommend mostly books and not textbooks, since you're going to read plenty of those in the future. And (2) I'm going to only focus on the area of cognitive psychology & neuroscience. With that being said:

Beginner:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales By Oliver Sacks

Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives By Dean Buonomano

Kludge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Mind By Gary Marcus

The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament By Robert M. Sapolsky

The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers By Daniel L. Schacter

Intermediate: (I'm going to throw this in here, because reading the beginner texts will not allow you to really follow the advanced texts.)

Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind By Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry & George R. Mangun

Advanced:

The Prefrontal Cortex By Joaquin Fuster

The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness By J. Allan Hobson

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning By Keith J. Holyoak & Robert G. Morrison

In the mean time you can read the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks He talks about a lot of very interesting case studies and several of them have to do with people who have a severed corpus callosum.

Also on his wikipedia page there is a picture of him wearing a shirt that says "WELCOME SQUID OVERLORDS" so you know he's good.

I second the reading idea! Ask your history or science teachers for suggestions of accessible books. I'm going to list some that I found interesting or want to read, and add more as I think of them.

A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Title explains it all. It is very beginner friendly, and has some very entertaining stories. Bryson is very heavy on the history and it's rather long but you should definitely make every effort to finish it.

Lies my teacher told me

The greatest stories never told (This is a whole series, there are books on Presidents, science, and war as well).

There's a series by Edward Rutherfurd that tells history stories that are loosely based on fact. There are books on London and ancient England, Ireland, Russia, and one on New York

I read this book a while ago and loved it- Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk It's about a monk who was imprisoned for 30 years by the Chinese.

The Grapes of Wrath.

Les Misérables. I linked to the unabridged one on purpose. It's SO WORTH IT. One of my favorite books of all time, and there's a lot of French history in it. It's also the first book that made me bawl at the end.

You'll also want the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Federalist Papers.

I'm not sure what you have covered in history, but you'll definitely want to find stuff on all the major wars, slavery, the Bubonic Plague, the French Revolution, & ancient Greek and Roman history.

As for science, find these two if you have any interest in how the brain works (and they're pretty approachable).
Phantoms in the brain
The man who mistook his wife for a hat

Alex and Me The story of a scientist and the incredibly intelligent parrot she studied.

For a background in evolution, you could go with The ancestor's tale

A biography of Marie Curie

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is a quick and easy read, and very heavy on the adventure. You'll also want to read his other book The Hot Zone about Ebola. Absolutely fascinating, I couldn't put this one down.

The Devil's Teeth About sharks and the scientists who study them. What's not to like?

On Becoming a Person

• Classic book about psychotherapy from a giant in the field and written for the layperson. Really, anything by Rogers is good.
  
  The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
  
  
• you can probably argue that this collection of case studies is more neurology than psychology, but I think it overlaps and is a very interesting read.

Oliver Sacks' exploration of mental illness has an existential bent to it that I've always appreciated. His book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" is fascinating and touches on how simple faculties of the mind make up our consciousness, our existence. One of his patients literally cannot distinguish his wife from his hat (the title story), and Sacks discusses how this inability shapes his patient's understanding of himself and the world.

Years later and I'm still geeking out about it.

https://smile.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_1?crid=M7R0DJM18914&keywords=the+man+who+mistook+his+wife+for+a+hat&qid=1573405204&sprefix=the+man+who+mist%2Caps%2C226&sr=8-1

Fancy word is Prosopagnosia. If you're interested, you'll like the collection of short medical tales by Oliver Sachs called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (Amazon link).

Given his interest in science and that he's got a reather short attention span I'd go for The man who mistook his wife for a hat. They are short stories about individuals whose brains are just not working right.

Was this from "the man who mistook his wife for a hat?"

The psychological reasons why people believe this kind of stuff are pretty easy to explain. For example see my post in this thread about confirmation bias and the look-elsewhere effect. It also might be worth mentioning that human perception is a bit of a mess; experimenting with psychedelics can be helpful in getting a sense of this, or maybe reading some Oliver Sacks. Basically there is pretty good scientific evidence that you can't always trust what you think you see. Finally, you do have a good question in there that I think is worth taking seriously: "why not?" Besides philosophical issues with mind-body dualism, I'd respond "Because there is simply no scientific evidence for it whatsoever." If there were a separate world of ghosts that could interact with our world, they would presumably be detectable through any of many extremely sensitive scientific experiments.

You may find this book right up your alley then: http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

Well, if you can sink as much time into Wikipedia as I can, that's a good start. And don't skip the references and links at the bottom; that's 90% of the fun!

There are a lot of good, popular-audience books on these topics. I don't know any about BCI in particular, but check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (and other stuff by Oliver Sacks) and Phantoms in the Brain. Those are the ones we read in COGS 1 and they're great. Right now I'm reading Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist; How We Decide was also good. Also, don't shy away from academic literature. It's not really so hard to read if you're interested.

Are you or could you be in college? Check my advice here. If you at least live near a college, sit in on some classes. Write to a professor and see if there's lab work to do, maybe as a volunteer. That could get your foot in the door.

If I were to stipulate that the sole impact of alcohol on a brain was the inhibit "higher thinking" and cause one to "rely on more basic instincts", which I am not convinced of, I would still have to question your concept of those "more basic instincts" being somehow more "core" than other behaviors. Why should disabling part of your brain imply that the part that is not disabled is more "true"? Almost any part of a brain can be less active than that same part is in a neurotypical person, which can lead to all sorts of different bizarre behaviors (The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, anyone?).

To assess a person's behavior under a particular intoxicant as "deep rooted" in comparison to their behavior under non-intoxicated or otherwise intoxicated situations, which is apparently "less real", is purely based on cultural bias.

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Taylor: A neuroscientist has a stroke and learns to walk, talk, eat, write, or recall her memories.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks: Interesting case studies of patients who suffered from extreme/rare neurological disorders.

Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon: Not necessarily speech-language pathology specific, but it includes chapters identity, self-perception, social perception of people with autism, Down syndrome, and Deaf culture. I read this book recently, and it's absolutely brilliant.

If you liked Musicophila, I would definitely recommend some of Oliver Sacks' other books, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which is collection of case studies about people with unique neurological disorders. Understanding how the brain falls apart gives an entirely new perspective into what's going on when the brain is working.

I also love the book The Most Human Human by Brian Christian. It's a fascinating mix of tech and philosophy and psychology - one of my favorite non-fiction books.

Maybe look into some of Malcolm Gladwell's books too. They're pretty quick reads - entertaining and thought-provoking, very sociology/social psychology based.

Not really sure what you're looking for, but check out some of Oliver Saks audiobooks. "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" was excellent for a non-fiction audiobook with a clinical approach that was easily digestible for a laymen.

True, they are slightly different. I'm willing to bet both will eventually map to defects in the cortical homunculus, though.

IIRC, the patient you're referring to is discussed in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. A fascinating book that I highly recommend to everyone interested in how the mind works.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0684853949?pc_redir=1406693908&robot_redir=1

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is really great. DFTBA :)

This would be great!

I love reading books!

This book is well worth picking up if you find this video interesting, very, very interesting:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks

Should go in a cardiological version of this book.

He must be this guy.

You could try reading this book as a general investigations of neurological disorder (including Tourette's). I don't think this is the place for medical advice though. Contact a neurologist or inform your doctor that the medicine you are currently taking is insufficient and ask if there is another treatment that might be more successful for you.

Oldy but goody:

Oliver Sacks, Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat:


http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=la_B000APZZY6_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452669144&sr=1-3

So many! Dissociative Identity disorder (more commonly know as Multiple Personality Disorder); Psychopathy (especially because we know so little about it.) ; Phantom limbs ; Capgras syndrom ( delusion that a close friend or family member has been replaced by aliens) ; Hyprocondriasis; Narcolepsy; sleep paralysis; Dissociative Fugue ; The case of H.M. (a very well known case study on memory loss. He was a man who suffered retrograde amnesia, but whose working memory was still intact. taught us a lot about different types of memory and their corresponding brain redgions...

There are plenty of others that I cannot think of off the top of my head. But if you are looking for some interesting cases, here are two great books about really strange and interesting psychological phenomenons are "The Man Who Mistook His for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales" by Oliver Sacks , and " Phantoms in the Brain" by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

The first one includes several cases of patients with inexplicably strange neurological disorders. For example, a man who is no longer able to recognize people and common objects. There is an other story about a man who sometimes wakes suddenly at night, thoroughly convinced that his leg is actually a corpse's leg that somebody has placed in bed with him.

The second book was the text book for my cognitive psych class in second year. Like the first book contains many stories of fantastically strange cases that the author has encountered as a neuroscientist. This book contains more of the psychological and neurological basis for the disorders, and shows how they helped us understand different aspects of behaviour and structures of the brain.

> So what do you feel and experience when you took the 150ug?

• "stoned" feeling in my head
  
  
• classic LSD visual distortions: warping of shapes and textures, some pink/purple tinting of colors, some (subtle) tracers
  
  
• the main thing was that music was richer. the analogy I made to my wife was the difference was between looking at a pool and swimming in the pool. rather than experiencing the music from a distance, I felt immersed in it. I also had enhanced coctail party effect -- I could appreciate the music as a whole, but I could also focus on one instrument or one voice in the mix and it would just stand out clearly from all the other components in the mix. Listening to the Beatles "A Day In The Life" with headphones and my eyes closed was a profound experience.
  
  
• something happened at 150ug that didn't happen at 100ug and that was that my sense of taste was entirely thrown off. I had a good quality salt + toffee milk chocolate bar to snack on. At lower doses, the flavor seemed enhanced. At 150, it was terrible -- it tasted like paste. I'm not sure if it was due to the higher dose, or that normally I eat lightly before the trip, but on that particular day I had had a hearty lunch just before starting.
  
  As for 400-600 ug -- I don't know if I'll ever get that heavy. I'll keep doing 50 ug increments until either I find what I'm looking for, or it gets too unpleasant, or it puts too much burden on my wife. If I never did LSD again I would be OK with that too.
  
  Getting back to spirituality, one of my favorite books ever is "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" by Oliver Sacks. It contains a number of cases of people who had brain malfunctions (injury, stroke, horribly allergic reaction), and those malfunctions also shed a lot of light on how "normal" brains operate. It led me to believe that our consciousness and personalities are actually thin veneers and are far more brittle than we suspect. Other reading has led me to believe that a lot of what we think we "know" as fact is actually highly suspect. Dabbling with LSD has only reinforced these beliefs. While there is no doubt that people have profound experiences while taking it, I believe that the truth it reveals isn't some hidden truth of the universe but rather a truth about how our brains use heuristics and extrapolation to try and make sense of the world.

I second Oliver Sacks - Hallucinations or this oliver sacks book. Also "Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons" is good and provides a more general overview

> Like, the idea of "things" is too imperfect of a model of reality to try and do things like reliably say "this is a ship" or "this is a whale.

Do you have any evidence to back this up? Because you seem to be saying that we can't reliably recognize and name things and that's just completely false. In fact, when people start having trouble reliably recognizing and naming things, neurologists like Oliver Sachs write books about them because it is so unusual. The book, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an amazing book anyway; you should check it out sometime.

The fact that there are edge cases sometimes that are harder to classify and name doesn't change the basic facts.

The Selfish Gene

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Chance and Necessity

It's all about the karma.

[Link] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0684853949/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=QUWK5EUYODF0&coliid=IBDJVDUJMOUEV)