Daniel J. Levitin, neuroscientist and author of This Is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind
Oliver Sacks visited Montreal ten years ago to give a lecture. As soon as he checked into his hotel room at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, he discovered that they had put him in the John Lennon Suite. This was the room where Lennon and Yoko Ono held their famous “bed-in for peace” demonstration, playing host to an assortment of visitors (including Timothy Leary and Tommy Smothers), and recording one of their most famous anthems, “Give Peace A Chance.” Oliver was not much of a popular music fan, but he knew how important The Beatles were to me, so he insisted that I come over to see the room. I immediately recognized the room from the films taken at the time—the view at the window hadn’t changed much, and Oliver, his assistant Kate, and I stood there in silent reflection for several minutes, summoning the spirit of peace and love that had transformed that room so many years ago.
On that same visit, Oliver stopped by my lab. There, he met with the undergraduate and graduate students who were working on various projects, and gave each of them his full attention. He was curious about what they were working on. He asked them questions and listened intently, and then gave each one a stunningly insightful suggestion about what they should do next to move their research forward.
Oliver taught all of us about the power and joy that come from being curious. Oliver was curious about a great many things: absolute pitch, insects, hallucinations, mind-altering experiences (either drug- or injury-induced), perceptual disorders, and theater are just a few. He loved Mozart, 3-D viewscopes, the chemical elements, swimming, and ferns. We were colleagues and friends, and he was both one of my biggest inspirations and biggest supporters. We shared drafts of our writing, ate sushi, went for walks in Greenwich Village, and played the piano for one another.
Oliver and I agreed that Sigmund Freud got many things wrong, but one thing he got right was that, after food, shelter, and companionship, humans need to have meaningful work. Oliver found great meaning in his work, and through that, so did millions of others. He worked intensely, but also knew the value of breaks, recreation (he swam regularly) and meals with friends. Like Freud, Oliver wrote compelling accounts of his patients. But in Oliver's hands, these accounts became literature. He created the genre of medical case studies as popular literature, opening the door for the many lay books about the brain that have followed. But no other writer brings his sense of the literary, the comic and the tragic, and his sense of humanity to scientific writing.
As I saw him do on so many other occasions, he left all my students in that room ten years ago feeling as though they had done him a favor, for he had learned so much that was new to him. Oliver has now left this room and has done all of us an enormous favor by igniting our curiosity and showing us that science and compassion, rationalism and love, can feed one another.
