> The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.
TLDR
> after her grandmother’s death...she becomes decisive, joining a theatre group.... in the transcripts... [she] never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair.
AFAICT the quote above is the only thing directly relevant to the title.
From what I read, skimming through the article, it paints Sacks as being a delusion driven emotional romantic and was practicing some sort of cult medicine, but I can't tell how much of that is reality and how much is NYT's ridiculously flowery embellishing of everything.
Also a very notable statistic/anecdote at the end. I don't know how wide the scope (only one university?), but about a third of the incoming neurology students chose the field because of Oliver Sacks.
I always found the bulk of the criticism leveled against him to be faulty. However, if he did indeed fabricate a lot of details - it is concerning.
Loved Oliver Sacks. He was such a kid at heart with a big brain and soft demeanor. His interviews are great. Here is one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AnuxDdg2II It is rare a lisp can improve how one sounds, but I like his.
This was a nice profile of (one side of) Sacks and his life, and as usual some mischievous or click-seeking online editor has given it a headline (and sub-heading) that are almost completely unrelated to what the article is about. In fact, at the bottom it says:
> Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2025, issue, with the headline “Mind Over Matter.”
and a headline like that (saying nothing) would be more appropriate to this.
The very fact that Sacks wrote about his patients has always had its detractors—based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, someone called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”—but what was surprising (to me) from this article is that it seems that after that early book, he actually became careful not to exaggerate or make up stories, to the extent that someone closely following him looking for discrepancies was not able to find any. I would have expected the stories to be mostly fictional, but it appears that this is so only of his early books.
I assumed the books were somewhat fictional (i.e. they were Gladwell-style) because if he meant to make a claim seriously he'd have published in a medical journal instead of a popular/literary book. But since writing the comment above, I've learned that over the years many people actually believed that all details in the books were literally true (you can search for e.g. [Sacks prime] to see many people who took the story seriously and analyzed them), which does put things in a different light.
>"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."
Pinker's tweet is how I actually ended up reading the article, then searching on HN for a possible related post. I read Sacks' major books, and I was always surprised by what I thought being his talent to romanticize real life. I guess it was too good to be (completely) true, after all :(
Yeah the thing about the twins calling out 20 digit prime numbers did it for me. Even allowing for the twins having some ridiculous magical ability to think up such primes, Sacks iirc claimed to confirm the numbers' primality by looking them up in a table of primes. Nuh uh.
While I also doubt the twins ability to calculate unknown primes, I do think that the article falls prey to many of the same trappings that they are calling out Oliver Sacks for.
While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.
Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.
Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
Same. And yes, I also feel the "satisfaction of witnessless vindication," since I was almost treated as a blasphemer when I criticized him in my circles.
I don't know of any thimble recent (or non-recent) where Gould was "caught fabricating details or whole results".
In 1981 Gould accused Morton of fabricating details. Gould died 20 years after that. Nine years after Gould died, some said Morton had not fabricated details.
I should add Morton was a phrenologist who did not believe in common descent.
> When [Sacks] woke up in the middle of the night with an erection, he would cool his penis by putting it in orange jello.
This is a remarkable sentence, and it appears suddenly in the article without context or explanation.
Naturally, there are questions. Was it necessarily orange jello? Does orange refer to the flavor or the color? What property of this particular jello made it preferable to other flavors and colors of jello? Did he prepare the jello for this particular purpose, or did he have other uses for the orange jello? What were they? Did he reuse jello or discard it after one use? Most important though: why would he do this??
I think the title doesn't really give a good impression of the contents of the article.
The article spends most time on evolution Sacks' homosexual identity and struggle with sexuality and repression.
His uncertainty and melancholical bouts maar him question his own work and make the author conclude him 'putting himself in his work'.
However very little evidence is presented. Most insinuated about is 'awakenings' yet even in that case it's hard to reach conclusions.
The author plays of his perennial self-doubt as aan admission, but there's very scant evidence about him actually making up stories.
I'm not saying his method is our isn't flawed, it's just that the title belies the story. The struggle with his sexuality is the main subject and only small bits are about his uncertainty of his work.
You're leaving out that he made up stories, and admitted it in private. Also that the article looked at primary sources, and saw that things that he said were not true.
You're just making it look like the article is picking on a troubled, vulnerable person for being troubled and vulnerable, and ignoring the elements of the article inconvenient to that, such as the mild-mannered, introverted patient made disruptively ultra-sexual by L-dopa who had actually been an enthusiastic rapist and who no one described as shy and introverted. Or the audio recordings of a woman being told how she felt by him (and denying it), and how she was described that way in the books. Or how he put quotes from his own interests into his patients mouths.
> there's very scant evidence
If you ignore it, there isn't any. Do you think there's some threshold of quotes you're allowed to make up, or abilities you're allowed to give to people that they don't have (like the prime number thing, that even involved a fictional book), or a particular number of lies you get to tell about someone's past before it becomes dishonest?
I have no idea what motivates people to make excuses like this for professional dishonesty. Sometimes I just think it's celebrity worship, but other times I think it's because people are dishonest in their own professional lives, and want to be excused by proxy.
Another book I was recently sad to learn was at fabricated is The Salt Path, which was great but apparently based on lies, the author was fleeing debt and lawsuits and stole $86,000 from their previous employer prior the walk. What is super sad is they didn't pay the people back they stole money from after their book became a best seller:
(I wanted to put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204853 in the second chance pool* but it was too old, so I spawned a new copy of the submission and moved the (relevant) comments hither. I hope that's ok as a technical workaround...
I feel that his pretentious, overwrought and unctuous writing was perhaps all because of an emptiness or inadequacy… His final years as a nice old gay man seem much more _normal_ and real, and he seems less of a fantasist at that stage…
I disregarded everything from him after I read two of his books. It’s not perfect, but my rule of thumb is simple: If a scientific story feels sexy, cinematic, and narratively perfect, it’s likely fabrication.
Same reason I have been skeptical towards dark energy, EMDR, and the blue light destroys sleep craze. And many other stupid stuff. If you like a story or a finding, that’s a clue to double the critical sceptisism.
I'd always assumed that the patients in Sacks' books were lightly fictionalized composites that combined interesting features from multiple cases. The purpose being to illustrate conditions and aspects of human psychology for a general readership. Since they weren't presented as rigorous case studies, I didn't take them to be that. I find what Sacks did much less irksome than more recent psychological and social studies books that pretend to be presenting rigorous scientific fact when they are, in fact, tendentious bullshit.
51 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 89.8 ms ] thread> The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.
TLDR
> after her grandmother’s death...she becomes decisive, joining a theatre group.... in the transcripts... [she] never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair.
AFAICT the quote above is the only thing directly relevant to the title.
From what I read, skimming through the article, it paints Sacks as being a delusion driven emotional romantic and was practicing some sort of cult medicine, but I can't tell how much of that is reality and how much is NYT's ridiculously flowery embellishing of everything.
Also a very notable statistic/anecdote at the end. I don't know how wide the scope (only one university?), but about a third of the incoming neurology students chose the field because of Oliver Sacks.
I always found the bulk of the criticism leveled against him to be faulty. However, if he did indeed fabricate a lot of details - it is concerning.
> Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2025, issue, with the headline “Mind Over Matter.”
and a headline like that (saying nothing) would be more appropriate to this.
The very fact that Sacks wrote about his patients has always had its detractors—based on his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, someone called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”—but what was surprising (to me) from this article is that it seems that after that early book, he actually became careful not to exaggerate or make up stories, to the extent that someone closely following him looking for discrepancies was not able to find any. I would have expected the stories to be mostly fictional, but it appears that this is so only of his early books.
what exactly was I supposed to find and see people believe?
>https://x.com/sapinker/status/1999297395478106310
>"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."
"Science" of the 1900s was heavily influenced by people willing to do whatever it took to achieve fame or fortune.
The replication crisis is the result.
The Solvay Conference happened in 1927
Added: ok, found a more careful description. https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and...
While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.
Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.
Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
In 1981 Gould accused Morton of fabricating details. Gould died 20 years after that. Nine years after Gould died, some said Morton had not fabricated details.
I should add Morton was a phrenologist who did not believe in common descent.
This is a remarkable sentence, and it appears suddenly in the article without context or explanation.
Naturally, there are questions. Was it necessarily orange jello? Does orange refer to the flavor or the color? What property of this particular jello made it preferable to other flavors and colors of jello? Did he prepare the jello for this particular purpose, or did he have other uses for the orange jello? What were they? Did he reuse jello or discard it after one use? Most important though: why would he do this??
The article does not say.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/orange-fruit-color-ori...
The article spends most time on evolution Sacks' homosexual identity and struggle with sexuality and repression.
His uncertainty and melancholical bouts maar him question his own work and make the author conclude him 'putting himself in his work'.
However very little evidence is presented. Most insinuated about is 'awakenings' yet even in that case it's hard to reach conclusions.
The author plays of his perennial self-doubt as aan admission, but there's very scant evidence about him actually making up stories.
I'm not saying his method is our isn't flawed, it's just that the title belies the story. The struggle with his sexuality is the main subject and only small bits are about his uncertainty of his work.
You're just making it look like the article is picking on a troubled, vulnerable person for being troubled and vulnerable, and ignoring the elements of the article inconvenient to that, such as the mild-mannered, introverted patient made disruptively ultra-sexual by L-dopa who had actually been an enthusiastic rapist and who no one described as shy and introverted. Or the audio recordings of a woman being told how she felt by him (and denying it), and how she was described that way in the books. Or how he put quotes from his own interests into his patients mouths.
> there's very scant evidence
If you ignore it, there isn't any. Do you think there's some threshold of quotes you're allowed to make up, or abilities you're allowed to give to people that they don't have (like the prime number thing, that even involved a fictional book), or a particular number of lies you get to tell about someone's past before it becomes dishonest?
I have no idea what motivates people to make excuses like this for professional dishonesty. Sometimes I just think it's celebrity worship, but other times I think it's because people are dishonest in their own professional lives, and want to be excused by proxy.
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-p...
It's also became a movie staring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Cups_of_Tea#Controversy>
Specific allegations and refutations were raised by 60 Minutes and The Daily Beast:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20110416212133/http://www.cbsnew...>
<https://web.archive.org/web/20110424154702/https://news.yaho...>
* explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
Same reason I have been skeptical towards dark energy, EMDR, and the blue light destroys sleep craze. And many other stupid stuff. If you like a story or a finding, that’s a clue to double the critical sceptisism.