The Last Hippie Summary free essay sample

The subjects name was Greg. He was born and raised in Queens, New York to a professional family. His greatest passion in life was music, and more specifically The Grateful Dead. As years went on Greg became defiant and started using drugs. Mainly, he enjoyed taking acid. Eventually, Greg left home to join the Krisha Hare. Greg started to complain of dimming eyesight, but the people of the Krishna Hare church only attributed it to his growing inner light. Eventually, Gregs parents came to visit him after some years and were mortified to see that their son was not only fat and bald, but now he was completely blind. Greg was soon admitted to Williamsbridge hospital where it was discovered that a benign tumor had grown large enough to damage his the frontal lobe of his brain. This caused severe brain damage impairing Greg’s cognitive thinking and completely destroyed his vision. We will write a custom essay sample on The Last Hippie Summary or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Because Greg’s brain was damaged in such a way, he was not aware that he was blind. In one instance, in an eager attempt to teach him how to read braille, Greg was emotionally distressed when he thought others thought he was blind because he â€Å"obviously wasn’t†. Dr. Sacks also writes how Greg would â€Å"watch television†, but facing the opposite wall. Possibly the greatest struggle for Dr. Sacks, while treating Greg, was his inability to retain learned information. Greg could remember things from the sixties so vividly, but could not remember a short melody that Sacks would play for him only a few minutes prior. His short-term memory was completely lost with the damage to his frontal lobe. At the end of Sacks writings about Greg, he tells the story about how he took Greg to his most beloved Grateful Dead show at MSG. The next day when Sacks mentions The Garden to Greg, he promptly responds with Ive never been to the Garden making this study both paradoxical and dismal. References: Sacks, Oliver, and A. Freeman. An anthropologist on Mars. Journal of Consciousness Studies 1.2 (1994): 234-240. Gay, George R., et al. Love and Haight: The sensuous hippie revisited. Drug/sex practices in San Francisco, 1980–81. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 14.1-2 (1982): 111-123. Urey, H. C., and A. H. W. Aten Jr. On the chemical differences between nitrogen isotopes. Physical Review 50.6 (1936): 575. Smith, David E. Runaways and their health problems in Haight-Ashbury during the summer of 1967. American Journal of Public Health and the Nations Health 59.11 (1969): 2046-2050. Boer, A. P., and C. N. Sipprelle. Induced anxiety in the treatment for LSD effects. Psychotherapy and psychosomatics 17.2 (1969): 108-113. Williams, Frank S. Alienation of youth as reflected in the hippie movement. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 9.2 (1970): 251-263.