The Writer Who Couldn't Read

by ROBERT KRULWICH

June 21, 2010
"In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to create a short video to let you see his story. Our narrator and animator is San Francisco artist Lev Yilmaz.

On July 31, 2001, Engel woke up, dressed, made breakfast, and then went to the front door to get his newspaper. "I wasn't aware," he says in our NPR interview, "that it was any different from any other morning."

But it was. When he looked at the front page — it was the Toronto Globe and Mail, an English-language journal — the print on the page was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked vaguely "Serbo-Croatian or Korean," or some language he didn't know. Wondering if this was some kind of joke, he went to his bookshelf, pulled out a book he knew was in English, and it too was in the same gibberish.

Engel had suffered a stroke. It had damaged the part of his brain we use when we read, so he couldn't make sense of letters or words. He was suffering from what the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls "word blindness." His eyes worked. He could see shapes on a page, but they made no sense to him. And because Engel writes detective stories for a living (he authored the Benny Cooperman mystery series, tales of a mild-mannered Toronto private eye), this was an extra-terrible blow. "I thought, well I'm done as a writer. I'm finished."

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750

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persevere; I'm not sure I'd be so resilient...

and the places I loved working most in my years as a nurse were the units that dealt with them, exclusively. You can pinpoint which area of the brain has been affected and, given intensive rehab, you can regrow wiring to access it again in many people. The whole thing was fascinating.

I saw word blindness as the presenting symptom with no other problems only once. It's quite rare.

What an interesting man.

about his spelling. Though he made a recovery, the docs told him it would go to hell, and he said it did have far to go! :) Very interesting story. Thanks for posting it!

I highly recommend his book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat". It describes a number of unusual real world neurological cases. Sacks is a very entertaining writer.

can "write" a book. It's called hiring a steno, or in today's world, buying a dictation program. Extra-terrible only because he's over-reactive.

to write such a vicious rant against a stroke survivor. Bad form.

She was clearly illiterate.