1986: Oliver Sacks' book on patients with unusual neurological disorders, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, spends 26 weeks on the NYT best seller list.
Paul Slansky says:
One highlight is an account of oppositely impaired patients—aphasiacs who can't understand words but do take in information from extraverbal cues, and tonal agnosiacs who understand the actual words but miss their emotional content—watching a speech by President Reagan.A longer excerpt: The President's Speech
"It was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice," writes Sacks, which caused the word-deaf aphasiacs to laugh hysterically at the Great Communicator, while one agnosiac, relying entirely on the actual words, sat in stony silence, concluding that "he is not cogent ... his word-use is improper" and suspecting that "he has something to conceal."
"Here then," writes Sacks "was the paradox of the President's speech. We normals — aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled were indeed well and truly fooled ... And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remain intact, undeceived."
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