The River of Consciousness

The River of Consciousness

<b>From the bestselling author of <i>Gratitude</i> and <i>Musicophilia</i>, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience.</b><br><br>Oliver Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (<i>Awakenings</i>, <i>An Anthropologist on Mars</i>) in which he explored many now-familiar disorders--autism, Tourette syndrome, face blindness. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable experiences that shaped him (<i>Uncle Tungsten</i>, <i>On the Move</i>, <i>Gratitude</i>). In the pieces that comprise <i>The River of Consciousness</i> (many first published in <i>The New York Review of Books</i>, among other places), Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes--above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age. The questions they explored--the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness--lie at the heart of science and of this book. <i>The River of Consciousness </i>demonstrates Sacks's unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.