“The “great crisis” in neuropsychology, as Oliver Sacks’s Russian mentor saw it, was reconciling two modes of scientific observation. One reduces complex phenomenon to their constituent parts- the way neurology had narrowed its focus from the observation of behavior to specific areas in the brain and then to individual neurons- which [his mentor] paralleled with the evolution of chemistry, from the study of gross matter to the study of compounds, to the study of individual atoms and elements. The other mode relies on the description of phenomena and intuition to comprehend the interactivity of whole systems. Either one, he argued, was inadequate without the other.
