Wired got some scientists to talk about what Oliver Sacks had meant to them.

Temple Grandin is the first.

A few weeks ago, I read an editorial he wrote about the Sabbath. He was originally brought up as an Orthodox Jew, but he decided to go another route, and at the end of the article he writes, “What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?” I just burst into tears in front of the computer reading that. I was crying so much I couldn’t even print it out. I sent him this card just before he died:

I started crying at the end of the article when you said, “What if A and B and C had been different?” If that had happened our paths probably would have never crossed. You have made a big difference in my life. Your life has been worthwhile, and you helped many people doing things to enlighten and help others to understand the meaning of life.

If Oliver had decided to stay an Orthodox Jew, his whole life of writing would have never happened. He just gave people so much insight into how the brain works. He just added so much to the literature of how the mind works, especially when the mind is a so-called not normal mind. He really got inside these minds. He got inside my mind.

As told to Sarah Zhang.

Daniel J Levitin, a neuroscientist and writer:

Oliver taught all of us about the power and joy that come from being curious. Oliver was curious about a great many things: absolute pitch, insects, hallucinations, mind-altering experiences (either drug- or injury-induced), perceptual disorders, and theater are just a few. He loved Mozart, 3-D viewscopes, the chemical elements, swimming, and ferns.

…

Like Freud, Oliver wrote compelling accounts of his patients. But in Oliver’s hands, these accounts became literature. He created the genre of medical case studies as popular literature, opening the door for the many lay books about the brain that have followed. But no other writer brings his sense of the literary, the comic and the tragic, and his sense of humanity to scientific writing.

As I saw him do on so many other occasions, he left all my students in that room ten years ago feeling as though they had done him a favor, for he had learned so much that was new to him. Oliver has now left this room and has done all of us an enormous favor by igniting our curiosity and showing us that science and compassion, rationalism and love, can feed one another.

Bradley Voytek, cognitive scientist:

The fact that I, a practicing neuroscientist, can openly admit to giving a shit about the human side of neuroscience without fearing “outing” myself as a soft thinker is in no small part due to artistry of Dr. Sacks’ blend of scientific rationality and human empathy. That’s an incredibly difficult line to walk when you’re faced with the existential reality that the very thing that makes us who we are can be changed in some way—for example by neurological trauma or injury—and can therefore change basic aspects of our perception and personality.

Dr. Sacks, through sheer force of compassion, reminded us, as a scientific field, that the very thing that makes neuroscience most frightening—its ability to expose our humanness as being tied to our physical self—is also why it’s so important for us to pursue it.