Oliver Sacks Foundation

07/25/2025

Привіт українським читачам по всьому світу! 📚🇺🇦 We are excited to share the brand new cover of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in Ukrainian - available now via the link below. 🙏 to Наш Формат for sharing these wonderful photos.

https://nashformat.ua/products/cholovik-yakyj-splutav-druzhynu-z-kapelyuhom-ta-inshi-istorii-z-likarskoi-praktyky-onovl.-vyd.-709803

06/18/2025

We are delighted to share that LETTERS by Oliver Sacks is now available in Spanish. Follow the link below to get your copy and browse the gorgeous collection of books by Dr. Sacks from Editorial Anagrama

https://www.anagrama-ed.es/libro/argumentos/cartas/9788433947369/A_627

05/26/2025

Directed, painted, and animated by Viviane Silvera, "See Memory" is a new film composed of over 30,000 individually hand-painted frames that visualizes how memory is formed, fragmented, and reshaped—bridging neuroscience, trauma research, and visual art.

In an interview for Medium alongside the film's premiere on PBS, Viviane talks about Oliver Sacks and the lasting impact of his work on See Memory:

“Then I came across Oliver Sacks’ essay Speak, Memory, where he described discovering that one of his own powerful childhood memories — of London during the Blitz — wasn’t his at all. It belonged to his brother. And yet he’d believed it. Written about it. Lived with it as truth.

The part that stopped me cold: Sacks explained that neurologically, the brain can’t tell the difference between an experienced memory and an imagined one.

That insight cracked something open in me.”

The film is now streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app, and airing nationally through May and June in honor of Mental Health and PTSD Awareness Months.

For more information visit: https://seememoryfilm.com/
Stream the film now: https://lnkd.in/etF3qvaX

A painter uses art to explore memory, PTSD, and breakthroughs in neuroscience.

05/20/2025

We are absolutely thrilled to bits that Dr. Oliver Wolf and the team at Bronx General Hospital will soon return to NBC — Brilliant Minds is bringing back the drama and heart for Season 2.

The hit series follows the many cases of Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto), a brilliant, unconventional neurologist based on the life and work of Oliver Sacks.

Zachary Quinto is returning to NBC for Brilliant Minds Season 2. Read on to learn more about the hospital drama's renewal.

05/11/2025

We recently came across this adorable photo of a young Oliver standing proudly in front of some tulips, somewhere in London. He went on to write: "As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit."

Did you grow any tulips or visit any tulip festivals this year? If so, we'd love to see them! 🌷

05/01/2025

Do you remember where you first heard about Oliver Sacks? Chances are pretty good it was on public television or radio. Perhaps on Science Friday or Radiolab? Morning Edition? A Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross? For so many of us, life without NPR or PBS is impossible to imagine, but we cannot take it for granted.

Click through to read about Oliver's experiences with public media, and how you can help support it before it's gone.

Do you remember where you first heard about Oliver Sacks? Chances are pretty good it was on public television or radio. Perhaps on Science Friday or Radiolab? Morning Edition? A Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross? For so many of us, life without NPR or PBS is impossible to imagine, but we cannot t...

04/17/2025

🎸Follow the link to watch the young guitar prodigy, better known as Maituo soulfully play the blues on a full-size adult guitar. The 9-year old began learning the classical guitar in 2020 and picked up the electrical guitar in 2021. He can shred along to hard rock and metal songs, recently coming up on stage during a performance in Thailand to play the iconic guitar solo in Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns ‘N Roses.

Do you know any prodigies? Oliver Sacks explores the phenomenon in An Anthropologist on Mars.

The amount of soul this kid has is off the charts. You'd think he lived through decades of heartbreak!

03/31/2025

We're celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach’s 340th birthday today with this photo of Oliver Sacks at his piano. He had a lifelong love of Bach's music and in "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood," recalls being told that when asked at five years old what his favorite things in the world were, he answered "smoked salmon and Bach."

03/12/2025

We are excited to share that The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks is part of The Nonfiction Hotlist, a selection of 24 films that have extraordinary creative potential and that need support to move forward. The feature documentary, directed and produced by Dempsey Rice, was chosen from 640 applications.

Featuring newly uncovered audio and video tapes by Oliver in the early part of his career (1960s-80s), the film combines this archive with the film-marker's on-camera interviews with Oliver, animation and new filming to create an intimate journey into his fantastical mind and groundbreaking work.

Follow along for updates.

We are thrilled to announce that The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks is one of 24 films selected to be on The Nonfiction Hotlist!!!

03/08/2025

Today we're celebrating one of the many women who inspired Oliver Sacks, his favorite "Auntie Len," Helena Landau. He describes in Uncle Tungsten and On the Move his deep attachment to his aunt, and how she taught him about botany and the mysteries of the Fibonacci sequence, among many other things. He often wrote letters to her, and a couple are included in the new LETTERS volume edited by Kate Edgar. Here's an excerpt from one he wrote to her during his travels in Canada in the summer of 1960. "The lodge is set in a huge alpine meadow, which was at its peak in early July. Dominant flowers are mountain avens (which were in seed when I arrived, like huge dandelion heads, alight and floating as they catch the morning sun). Indian paintbrush in every shade from faint cream to intense dayglo vermillion. Chalice cups, Trollius, valerians, saxifrages, contorted lousewort and stinking fleabane (two of the loveliest, despite their names!)."

02/11/2025

Today is World Epilepsy Day, a day focused on raising awareness and reducing stigma epilepsy, which affects around 50 million people worldwide.

Oliver Sacks wrote an entire chapter dedicated to epilepsy in “Hallucinations”. Get your copy here: https://www.oliversacks.com/oliver-sacks-books/hallucinations/

01/05/2025

Tune in to NBC on Monday, January 6 at 9pmET (an hour earlier than usual!) to catch the two-episode season finale of Brilliant Minds, the medical drama based on the life and work of Oliver Sacks starring Zachary Quinto as Dr. Wolf. The drama series is NBC’s No. 1 most-watched new show of the 2024-25 season.

The final two episodes, "The Doctor Whose World Collapsed" and "The Man Who Can't See Faces" feature guest appearances from Karen Robinson (Schitt's Creek) and Mandy Patinkin (Criminal Minds).

You can catch up on all episodes of Brilliant Minds on Peacock.

Read on to find out when the final two episodes of Brilliant Minds Season 1 premiere on NBC. Details below.