Olivia: Jackson, when you think of a world-famous neurologist, what's the first image that comes to mind? Jackson: Probably a quiet, bookish type in a tweed jacket. Maybe a bit frail, surrounded by dusty books. Definitely not a 240-pound, leather-clad biker who holds a California state record for squatting 600 pounds. Olivia: Exactly. And that's the paradox we're diving into today. The man who was both of those things, and so much more. Jackson: That's wild. Who are we talking about? Olivia: We're talking about the incredible life of Oliver Sacks, as told in his final memoir, On the Move. This book was published just before his death in 2015, and it's brutally honest. For decades, readers knew him through his compassionate case studies like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but this was the first time he really opened up about his own story. Jackson: So this is the behind-the-scenes, the real person. Olivia: Completely. He talks about his homosexuality, his intense battles with addiction in the 60s, and these incredible physical passions. It's a book that really re-contextualizes his entire body of work and reveals the restless, powerful, and often lonely man behind the beloved doctor.

Jackson: Okay, I'm still stuck on the 600-pound squat. Where did this intense physicality come from? It seems so at odds with the gentle, empathetic doctor we know from his books. Olivia: It's the central tension of his early life. He had this deep, almost primal longing for movement and power. He talks about feeling imprisoned and powerless as a boy in a strict English boarding school during the war, and that feeling manifested in this obsession with freedom. First it was motorcycles. Jackson: The classic symbol of rebellion and freedom. Olivia: And he wasn't just a casual rider. He was a "Ton-Up Boy," one of those guys in the 50s who would try to hit 100 miles per hour on public roads. There's this one incredible story from when he was 18. He bought a secondhand BSA Bantam motorbike, and on his very first ride, the throttle jammed wide open. Jackson: Oh no. That sounds like a nightmare. Olivia: He found himself trapped in an uncontrollable loop around Regent's Park in London. The brakes were useless, so all he could do was keep circling, hooting and yelling at pedestrians to get out of the way. Jackson: How did people react? Olivia: At first, they scattered in terror. But after he made a few laps, they started to realize what was happening and began to cheer him on! He became this bizarre, impromptu spectacle. Jackson: So he was basically the star of his own accidental parade! How did it end? Olivia: The bike eventually just ran out of gas and sputtered to a halt. He was completely unharmed. But it’s such a perfect metaphor for his life. His own schoolmaster wrote in a report, "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far." Jackson: That's incredibly perceptive. Was this just youthful recklessness, or was there something more to it? This 'going too far' seems like a recurring theme. Olivia: It absolutely is. He connects that physical restlessness directly to his intellectual drive. The same energy that made him push his body to the limit with weightlifting—and he really pushed it, setting that California state record for the squat with 600 pounds on his shoulders—was the same energy that drove him to explore the farthest reaches of the human mind. Jackson: So the body and mind weren't separate for him. They were two sides of the same coin. Olivia: Precisely. He even talks about how riding a motorcycle felt like a direct union of himself with the machine, an extension of his own body, much like riding a horse. It was a way of thinking and feeling, not just moving. This deep, intuitive understanding of the body, of proprioception, became fundamental to his work as a neurologist. He wasn't just observing his patients from a distance; he understood, on a visceral level, what it felt like to be a body in the world, whether it was moving freely or trapped by disease. Jackson: That makes so much sense. He wasn't just a brain studying other brains. He was a body studying other bodies. And that recklessness, that 'going too far,' also shows up in his experiments with drugs, right? Olivia: Oh, absolutely. In the 60s, he experimented heavily with all sorts of substances, from LSD to amphetamines. He describes one terrifying experience with Artane, an anti-Parkinsonian drug, where he had a completely normal, mundane conversation with two friends in his kitchen, only to walk into the living room and find it empty. The friends were never there. Jackson: Wow. A totally seamless hallucination. That must have been terrifying for a neurologist. Olivia: It was. He said it was frightening because it wasn't bizarre or fantastical; it was utterly real. And again, this experience of a mind capable of creating a false reality gave him a profound, firsthand insight into the psychoses his patients, including his own schizophrenic brother, were experiencing. His 'going too far' was a form of radical empathy.

Olivia: And that same tendency to 'go too far' is exactly what made him a revolutionary, and sometimes controversial, doctor. He was famously told he was a 'menace in the lab' and should just go see patients to 'do less harm.' Jackson: Wait, who told him that? That's brutal. And why was he a menace? Olivia: This was early in his career, when he was trying to be a research scientist. He was brilliant, but incredibly absentminded and clumsy. He describes a series of lab disasters, the final straw being when he spent months painstakingly extracting myelin from thousands of earthworms, only to have his lab notebook—the only record of his work—fly off his motorcycle on the Cross Bronx Expressway and get shredded by traffic. Jackson: You can't make this stuff up. So his bosses basically fired him from research. Olivia: They gently but firmly guided him toward clinical work. And it was the best thing that ever happened to him, and to medicine. Because it was in seeing patients that he found his true calling. This led him to Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, where he encountered a group of patients who had been warehoused for decades. Jackson: These were the 'Awakenings' patients? Olivia: Yes. They were survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic from the 1920s. They were frozen, like human statues, some unable to move or speak for forty years. The medical establishment had written them off as hopeless. But Sacks, with his unique perspective, saw something else. He saw intact minds and personalities trapped inside immobile bodies. Jackson: He saw the person, not just the disease. Olivia: Exactly. And when the drug L-dopa became available, he saw a chance. He started administering it to these patients, and what happened next was nothing short of miraculous. People who hadn't moved in decades began to walk, talk, and reconnect with the world. It was a true 'awakening.' Jackson: That's like a science fiction story come to life. It must have felt like a miracle. Olivia: It was, but it was also terrifying. The awakenings were not simple or stable. The patients' brains, damaged for so long, reacted unpredictably. They experienced wild swings, tics, and overwhelming compulsions. Sacks wrote that the drug didn't just restore them to normal; it plunged them into a new, often chaotic, world of experience. Jackson: And this is where he got some criticism, right? For turning his patients' stories into bestsellers. Was it ethical? Olivia: That's the core of the controversy that followed him for years. Some colleagues felt he was exploiting his patients for literary fame. But Sacks's defense was rooted in a deep philosophical belief he inherited from the great Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria. He believed that a purely clinical, 'veterinary' approach to medicine was failing these patients. Jackson: What do you mean by 'veterinary'? Olivia: He meant treating the disease but ignoring the person. For Sacks, you couldn't understand a neurological condition without understanding the patient's life, their history, their world. The case history had to be a story, a narrative. He wasn't just documenting symptoms; he was trying to capture a human soul's journey. And in many cases, like with 'Witty Ticcy Ray,' a man with Tourette's, he collaborated closely with the patient, who approved of the story being told. Jackson: So he was trying to create a more humanistic medicine. Olivia: Precisely. He was arguing that to truly heal, you have to see the whole person. And that radical idea, born from his own restless, boundary-pushing nature, is what made him one of the most important medical writers of the 20th century.

Jackson: It's fascinating how he fought to see the humanity in his patients. But the book reveals he really struggled to find that same connection in his own life. There's this profound loneliness running through it. Olivia: It's the most heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful part of the memoir. So much of that loneliness stemmed from a single, devastating moment in his youth. When he was eighteen, he told his father he was gay. His father was accepting, but when he told Sacks's mother, her reaction was brutal. Jackson: I remember reading this. It's just gut-wrenching. Olivia: She said to him, "You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born." And then she never spoke of it again. Sacks writes that her words haunted him for the rest of his life. He felt he had forfeited her love and, in a way, his right to love. Jackson: That quote from his mother is just devastating. It explains so much. The decades of solitude, the feeling of being an outsider. Olivia: It does. He remained celibate for thirty-five years after that. He poured all his passion into his work, his swimming, his writing. He had deep friendships with people like the poet Thom Gunn and W.H. Auden, and he found a sense of community on City Island in New York. But romantic love felt out of reach, something he felt he didn't deserve. Jackson: So how did that change? The book ends on such a note of joy and connection. Olivia: It's a beautiful story. In 2008, when he was 75, he met a writer named Billy Hayes. They started having dinner, and a deep friendship grew. Then, during a period where Sacks was in immense pain from surgeries, Billy confessed his love for him. Sacks writes that this confession allowed him to finally acknowledge his own feelings, which he had kept hidden even from himself. Jackson: Wow. At 75. That's incredible. Olivia: It completely transformed his final years. He writes about how this love broke his lifelong habits of solitude and self-absorption. For the first time, he felt he was truly part of a 'we' instead of just an 'I'. He found a home not just in a place, but in a person. Jackson: So after all that—the motorcycles, the drugs, the intense work—was love the final 'awakening' for him? Olivia: I think that's the perfect way to put it. It was the final integration. The restless, lonely boy who felt like an 'abomination' finally found a place of acceptance and belonging. It's a profound testament to the idea that it's never too late to find love and connection.

Olivia: When you look at his whole life, you realize Sacks's story wasn't about contradiction, but about synthesis. The physical energy of the weightlifter fueled the intellectual stamina of the neurologist. The pain of his own isolation and otherness fueled his profound empathy for his patients. Jackson: He turned his wounds into his greatest strengths. He used his own experience of 'going too far' to understand people who had been pushed to the very limits of human experience. He didn't just observe them; he journeyed with them. Olivia: And in doing so, he showed us that the most 'scientific' thing we can do is to see the human being at the center of it all. His legacy isn't just in neurology; it's in this powerful argument for a more compassionate, narrative-driven understanding of what it means to be human. Jackson: And his story makes you wonder—how many parts of ourselves do we keep hidden, thinking they don't fit? Sacks shows us that our fullest self is often found in embracing all those messy, contradictory pieces. Olivia: It's such a powerful message. We'd love to hear what you think. What part of Sacks's story resonated most with you? The biker, the doctor, the lonely man who found love? Find us on our socials and let us know. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.