"Mozart makes me a better neurologist"

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In an attempt to find the relationship between body and soul, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has studied the strange paradoxes of neurological disorders for more than 25 years. Never allowing the humanity of his subjects to be overshadowed by their clinical condition, Sacks has written more than 30 books, including "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," "Awakenings," and most recently, "An Anthropologist on Mars." The following is an excerpt from a recent conversation between Sacks and Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser as part of San Francisco's City Arts and Lectures series.

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What was it like to have Robin Williams become Oliver Sacks in the film "Awakenings"?

He's a wonderfully friendly man, and soon after we met, we went out together. We ate together, went out for a drive and saw a few patients together. I didn't realize, I just had no idea at that time, that I was the object of the most minute, most microscopic, and devastatingly accurate, observation. Except devastating is the wrong word because everything Robin does builds up, and it constructs from there.

When I'm nervous, I get this sort of odd posture, and I realized that Williams was in fact in the same posture. Not because he was imitating me, but because by that point he'd incorporated me, and this had become a natural position for him. He had incorporated my posture as he had incorporated my memories, my hopes, my experiences, my character. It was wonderful and rather frightening, suddenly having this younger twin. And at that point both of us decided that we needed to make some space for him to construct a character out of himself, which he did.

In that first stage of acting, perhaps all actors have to practice a kind of mimicry before the real creation is made, and I think it is in my own writing as well. I think perhaps all art starts as mimicry.

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