Response paper questions on Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars - Essay Example

Sacks is able to experience the distress in his patients by working with them. Additionally, he suffers from prosopagnosia and is in a better position to understand what being deficient of a sense means. The stories examine discernments about oneself as well as those about the world. This response paper examines Sack’s method of investigation, the reasons Sack takes a unique investigative approach and how he discovers the individuals discussed in the essays. The paper will also analyze how disease affects the way individuals understand themselves and how reading these essay has enable me understand concepts such as normality and handicap.

To come up with these stories, Dr. Sacks associates closely with the subjects in the stories. His insights are stimulating and provide an insight on neurological conditions and the manner in which the brain functions. He investigates the altered self-opening the mind of the reader to experiences and perceptions witnessed by people with disorders such as autism, blindness, amnesia, and Tourette’s syndrome among others. He views the ailments not as disorders but deviation from norm. However, he still manages to explore the distress and challenges faced by persons with these disorders.

Instead of analyzing the various conditions and organizing them into chapters, he organizes the conditions into narrative essays. This is a different but interesting way to learn neurobiology. Sack follows his patients from their loss of sense though their distress to their liberation. He empathizes with the patients after their loss of sense and reveals to the reader the struggle that they go through to cope with the deviations that result from the losses (Sacks 12-15). Sack makes use of literature references to support his arguments.

His investigative style is captivating and the reader is able to experience the terror that comes with the neurological disorders. When he