“I am very tenacious, for better or worse,” he wrote in “A Leg to Stand On.” “If my attention is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a great strength, or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional.”

Dr. Sacks explored some of the brain’s strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” achieving a level of renown rare among scientists.

Source: Oliver Sacks, Neurologist Who Wrote About the Brain’s Quirks, Dies at 82 – The New York Times