EFTA00847417.pdf

From: "jeffrey E." <[email protected]> To: David Grosof Subject: Re: Oliver Sacks Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 21:52:07 +0000 glad to hear , except for father On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 5:37 PM, David Grosof < > wrote: I am very sad to lose Oliver Sacks. I can scarcely imagine two people more different in personality than you and him, and so I hope your connection to him was as enriching as it could be. I chatted with him once but feel I know much more about what he was like from (1) his contributions to the radio show RadioLab and the like, (2) his writing, of course, and (3) a superb job he did presenting a poster at the gigantic Society for Neuroscience annual meeting —1991. It was about a neurologically impaired patient's color perception anomalies. Color vision is a vicious, competitive, complicated field and he survived aggressive interrogation by my colleague, and milder questioning from me, really really well. I was astonished that he could do such a great job with research in a particularly treacherous sub-field and it made me inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt about his popularly accessible contributions. Enriching the memory is that his poster was just one in a vast bazaar of research works. His work enjoyed no special status due to being the most famous neurologist in the Western world: it belonged in the poster session about visual sensory deficits from lesions or somesuch. I would have liked very much to talk to him about the hazards of "storytelling" in science, because he has admitted, with what seemed to be a mild regret, to changing the ending (the data) of patient stories in the UK edition of his first/early book Migraine. The temptation to compress and simplify in storytelling and obscure or erase troublesome anomalies is a hazard of scholarship and science, and it is particularly dangerous to science. I hope this email finds you well. I'm about to leave for Burning Man (my 9th time!). My father, quite diminished by what turns out now most likely to have been a long series of very small strokes, is in the precarious care of the crazy Carmen in the Bronx; my mother is frail and sharp as a whip on the Upper West Side. My brother has an exciting AI start-up under-way, with some revenue already, in Seattle (Coherent Knowledge Systems). Best, -d. David Grosof please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this EFTA00847417 communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to [email protected], and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved EFTA00847418