The contrast in Sacks's hobbies made me laugh. Amusing to see a neurologist, who's complemented for being
> a brilliant and vivid mind, a man whose intellectual appetite was vast, and whose professional and creative passions – far from being the self-absorbed obsessions of a pedant – were first and foremost an act of reaching out, the means through which he sought to communicate with others, a “love affair with the world”
and whose work, Letters, is
> crammed with off-the-cuff profundities, moments of elevated perception that briefly unriddle the more inscrutable aspects of human nature
can still enjoy the simpler (and funny) things in life, like bulking up via powerlifting:
> As a man of 30, dallying with powerlifting, Sacks routinely bragged to his parents about his weight, how much he could lift, the amount he ate – “I love to shake the pavement as I walk, to part crowds like the prow of a ship.” At Mount Zion, special scrubs had to be made to accommodate his bulk, and he found himself in disfavour with his superiors for stealing patients’ food.
Though you wouldn't know if from TFA, Sacks was also a life-long enthusiast of mind-altering substances[0]. His 2012 Hallucinations[1] inquires into the etiology and social and phenomenal aspects of its subject by examining cases from his patients and from his own recreational episodes and is a completely fascinating read!
> During the following 10 years or so, Sacks took a prodigious amount of amphetamines and psychotropics – “every dose an overdose” – with one trip producing visions of the “neurological heavens” so intense it inspired him to write his first book, Migraine (1970).
That time frame matches the NPR episode you cited:
> One chapter, called "Altered States," described his own experiments with mind-altering drugs in the '60s when he was a neurology resident.
Oops! Make that "though you wouldn't know it from hastily skimming TFA and a quick ctl-F on the wrong term in a misguided attempt to confirm your existing bias" then. Mea culpa!
Hallucinations has quite a bit of info on Sacks' career as a psychonaut which progressed over several decades (iirc).
> a brilliant and vivid mind, a man whose intellectual appetite was vast, and whose professional and creative passions – far from being the self-absorbed obsessions of a pedant – were first and foremost an act of reaching out, the means through which he sought to communicate with others, a “love affair with the world”
and whose work, Letters, is
> crammed with off-the-cuff profundities, moments of elevated perception that briefly unriddle the more inscrutable aspects of human nature
can still enjoy the simpler (and funny) things in life, like bulking up via powerlifting:
> As a man of 30, dallying with powerlifting, Sacks routinely bragged to his parents about his weight, how much he could lift, the amount he ate – “I love to shake the pavement as I walk, to part crowds like the prow of a ship.” At Mount Zion, special scrubs had to be made to accommodate his bulk, and he found himself in disfavour with his superiors for stealing patients’ food.