FRESH AIR
One chapter of the new book deals with altered states and Oliver Sacks’ personal experimentation with hallucinogenic and mind-altering drugs in the ’60s. He says the first time he tried marijuana, it induced fascinating perceptual distortion. He was looking at his hand, and it appeared to be retreating from him, yet getting larger and larger. “I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I’m strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘That must be what the hand of God is like.’ ” Sacks tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that he has always been fascinated with hallucinations — from reading about Pip’s hallucination of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to witnessing hallucinations of every sort as a medical student and doctor. He had a personal interest in the phenomenon, he explains, because his brother was a schizophrenic — and “would talk with his hallucinations.” MORE