Duke Institute for Brain Sciences

Duke's Weaver Lecture with Oliver Sacks, M.D.

November 05, 2008

Working at a Bronx hospital in 1966, neurologist Oliver Sacks encountered patients who had spent decades frozen in catatonic states, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of a worldwide pandemic known as “sleepy sickness” (severe Parkinson’s Disease) and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa. His success in bringing the patients back to life became the subject of his best-selling book, Awakenings. The story later inspired an Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, November 12th in Duke’s Page Auditorium, Sacks delivered the Weaver Lecture on “Music, Healing and the Brain.” The Duke University Libraries host the Weaver Lecture biennially in memory of William Weaver a Duke alumnus and former member of the Library Advisory Board. This year, the lecture was co-sponsored with the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

Dr. Sacks is one of the great medical writers and storytellers of our time, and his many bestselling books and frequent essays in The New Yorker have inspired and transformed our understanding of the human brain. His books are assigned reading in universities worldwide, in subjects as diverse as medicine, writing, psychology, ethics, religion and music. In Sacks’ recent book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Sacks delves into the nature of music and its powerful influence. He describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, can give words to stroke patients who otherwise cannot speak, and calm people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia.