Oliver Sacks The Last Hippie

“The Last Hippie” is a short chapter from Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. The chapter is centered around Greg, one of Dr. Sacks’ patients, and how his troubling teenager years subsequently led to him become an amnesiac who, “seemed bland, placid, and emptied of all feeling,” (Sacks, 1996, p.46). Although Greg’s story was very interesting to read, I did find it relatively difficult to follow along, and encountered many challenges while reading the chapter. All of the medical terminologies used in “The Last Hippie,” by neurologist, Oliver Sacks, made the chapter difficult for me to understand. Although Dr. Sacks, in some ways, dumbed down the story so that the average reader could read and enjoy his book, there are many crucial terms that he simply have to use to describe Greg’s situation. All the big words that he used intimated me at first, however, after looking up the words that I didn’t know, I
At first I thought that Greg would slowly come to realize his disability, but when Dr. Sacks arranged for him to learn braille, Greg became upset and said “If I were blind, I would be the first person to know it.” The internet didn’t prove as much help when I attempted to research why Greg is unable to recognize his disability. The closest I got to finding a definite answer is that Greg might be suffering from Anton-Babinski syndrome, which is rare, but can also caused by brain damage. After doing some easy research on the internet, I was able to visualize the story better. Especially now that I know the structure of the brain, I could really picture it in my head where Greg’s brain tumor was located and what parts of the brain was destroyed. Instead of reading words that are void of meanings to me, I now understand the different parts of the brain and their individual functions as