How long does it take to read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat?
And Other Clinical Tales
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks takes about 5 hours 39 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 39 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1980. 308 pages, about 84,700 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 25 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 39 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 32 minutes |
The page count is the median across 62 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Neurologist Oliver Sacks gathers twenty-four case histories drawn from his patients, each showing how damage or disturbance in the brain reshapes a person's perception, memory, movement or personality. The title story concerns a music teacher whose visual agnosia stops him from recognizing faces and everyday objects. Sacks groups the tales by theme: deficits, excesses, vivid returns of the past, and the gifts found in people with intellectual disabilities. Beyond describing each case, he explains its physiological basis and considers what such conditions suggest about the workings of the mind.
This summary was written by AI and checked by a second AI model. How these are chosen.
Subjects: Neurology -, Anecdotes, Neurology, Nervous system, Mental Disorders, Psychology, pathological
