Wednesday, February 7, 2001

Oliver Sacks to Speak on Creativity and the Brain


Chestertown, MD, February 7, 2001 — Oliver Sacks, neurologist and best-selling author ofThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, will speak on "Creativity and the Brain" Wednesday, March 21, 2001 at 4:30 p.m. in Washington College's Gibson Performing Arts Center, Tawes Theatre. A book signing in the Casey Academic Center Gallery will follow the presentation.
Sacks is best known for his explorations of the borderlands of neurological experience, examining the ways in which the whole person adapts to different neurological dysfunctions. His 1985 bestseller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, brought his unique work to the public eye, with a collection of case histories that demonstrated the extremes of brain dysfunction and the human struggle to overcome psychological fate. Sacks' earlier work on the victims of an epidemic of sleeping sickness, Awakenings, became the inspiration for the 1990 Hollywood movie of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Born in London, Sacks obtained his medical degree from Oxford University in 1958. He moved to the United States in the early 1960s and has lived in New York City since 1965, where he is a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Beth Abraham Hospital. His recent books include An Anthropologist on Mars (Knopf, 1995) and The Island of the Colorblind (Knopf, 1996).
The presentation is part of the Second Annual Jesse Ball duPont Behavioral Neuroscience Speaker Series sponsored by the Jesse Ball duPont Fund, the Gibson-Wagner Fund, the Washington College Department of Psychology and the Washington College Chapter of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society. The event is free and open to the public.

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