Every Cure Has a Musical Solution

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been made into a music theater production. Sacks is also the author of Awakenings, a work about victims of sleeping sickness, to whom he administered the experimental drug L-dopa.

Oliver Sacks suffered a severe injury while hiking which eventually led to the loss of feeling in his leg. His recovery and gave him insights into the treatment of his own patients who suffer from memory problems and encephalitis lethargica.

The famed neurologist talks to Fresh Air about how grief, trauma, brain injury, medications and neurological disorders can trigger hallucinations — and about his personal experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s.