> 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.

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.

* explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)

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://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-p...

It's also became a movie staring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.

>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."

> 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.

"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 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.