R.I.P. Oliver Sacks

Last weekend neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks died at the age of 82. His book The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is amazing and inspired me to make a documentary on a boy with no short term memory: Forever 19. The book consists of stories about people with their brain damaged or who have a brain disease. The stories are all as bizarre as if they were fictional stories: people who can't recognise faces or objects, whose limbs have become alien or shout involuntary obscenities. There are also the fascinating stories about 'idiot savants', people who are dismissed as retarded, but who are extremely good in maths or dates in the past. When reading it you have the strange sensation of not being sure what it is that makes a human being a human being.