College Essay

Your mind is the machine that controls your conscious. Everyone in the world is not in control of there own conscious like in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other Clinical Tales. Dr. Sacks tells there stories and how they are aware of there conscious. What is conscious? What does it mean to be conscious? Conscious is being aware of yourself and the external world. How do the individual patients in Dr. Sacks’ case studies exemplify what he calls the “neurology of identity”?
One bright and beautiful day, two friends a pair of Russian authors names Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, went for a walk. This is what happened:
Taking a walk one spring morning, Tolstory and Cherhov encounter a horse in the woods. Tolstory started talking about the horse, graphically imagining what the animal would think about the clouds overhead, the umbrageous trees, the smell of the wet earth, the flowers, and the sun. Chekhov, astonished, exclaimed that Tolstoy must have been a horse in an earlier life, because only a horse could know so completely what a horse would feel. Tolstoy responded, “No, but the day I came across my own inside, I came across everyone’s inside.”
How does he know how this horse feels his friend wonders? If you are not a horse and never have been a horse how do you assume this? He observes everything around the horse and the horse it self. The sun beaming on the horse back the wet grass he is eating he noticed it all. He realizes that he doesn’t have to be a horse to feel or describe what they are feeling. This is just like the consciousness of the people in this book. They learn to observe and gain a new identity towards there consciousness. It comes easy to them as the man could describe how the horse was feeling.
“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” Dr. Sacks cannot recognize faces or visual images. He realized that he was having trouble seeing his students. His brain is deteriorating in a way that causes him to see only individual features and not the whole. His lost in consciousness was sight. He was not blind he just couldn’t make out all things. He could only see things like strong features in people faces. He can only keep at a task by singing, and if he’s interrupted, he forgets everything. Dr. Sacks helps him to create a new identity of self by gaining new ways to control his consciousness and that was by singing. He was a Music teacher and loved music and that’s the only way he could function. Dr. Sacks really did not have to prescribe him because he found his own cure naturally. The patient has become more conscious to his surroundings he hears more than he use to. His hearing has become his new eyes, and music has become his new way to function.
“The Lost Mariner” A forty-nine year old man cannot remember anything past the mid-1940s, and he always thinks he is nine-teen. He can’t hold any thought for more than a few seconds, although he is very sharp. He remembers things like what a doctor is and how a doctor looks or dresses, but cant remembers things after so many seconds. “Memory, mental activities, mind along, could not hold him; but moral attention and actions could hold him completely.” Basically he can not remember what just happen a few seconds ago he remembers things that were changed from years ago. He notice that he curtains at his house was green and that they have been changed he remembers that there was a movie theater that is no longer there. He was just confused. He has no real emotions, since he can’t really remember anything, but he seems to find peace when he gardens. This patient has a double conscious. He lives within two ages.
“The Disembodied Lady” A once-healthy woman suddenly loses all sense of movement” her sense of self and where her body is. The brain has to send the message to your body which it would usually do consciously; it creates a “sense of self” by sending signals to the brain which helps yourself control consciously. She has to relearn walking,

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