On Oliver Sacks and His Obsession with Weightlifting

At the same time, his medical mind was given free rein to treat his own body like a science project, bulking up into the sport’s heaviest weight category and maximizing his hulking form’s strength. Sacks’s careers as both a doctor and a writer were defined by his quest to demystify the connections between body and mind, to understand how the lump of pink flesh and electricity inside our skulls could produce something as complex, contradictory, and variable as a human being. Later in On the Move, Sacks relates an anecdote about his first time lifting at a new gym that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has dabbled in the sport: “The first time I went there (The Central YMCA in San Francisco), my eye was caught by a bench press bar loaded with nearly 400 pounds.

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