STOP PRESS: a beloved 20th Century populariser of psychology who wrote massively successful books has been shown to be full of crap. Actually… don’t stop press. Just put it on the pile with all the others.
This time it’s Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and many other books. An article in The New Yorker has shown that a lot of his case studies were, well… let’s say they’re not what they seem. In this episode we discuss the new article and Oliver Sacks’s career more generally, and ask: should we have known?
The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. The article we discussed on today’s show is about the tragically low South Korean birth rate, and why it got that way. Find that, and so many more articles about human progress, science, and technology, at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
Rachel Aviv’s December 2025 New Yorker article on Oliver Sacks
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders letter about “questionable aspects” of the autistic savant twins story, by Makoto Yamaguchi
Follow-up article by the same author
Response letter by Allan Snyder
Medical Humanities article on 10 years since Sacks’s death
Paul McHugh’s 1995 bad review of Sacks’s work
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
