Two things I made note of when reading “The Last Hippie” by Oliver Sacks were issues of memory and how people’s lives are constructed.

Noting memory, Deadhead Greg seems to have lost his ability to concretely remember anything past the late 1960s. However, what struck me (more than his unawareness of his condition) was that Greg actually remembered things and conveyed his ability to do so, albeit in abstract ways. Sacks, too, notes the existence of some form of internal recollection: “But While Greg was so often unable to recall events or encounters or facts to consciousness, he might nonetheless have an unconscious or implicit memory of them, a memory expressed in performance or behavior” (53). Whether it was Greg feeling like he had “lost” something even if he did not explicitly recall the death of his dad, or the recognition of newer pieces of Grateful Dead music (endnote 19 really makes this piece, finishing it on a brighter note), Greg still has some kind of ability to form connections and make memories. What interests me are the “unconscious or implicit”; what are these things that I internally know and act upon?

Noting constructs, I noted a passage on page 67, in regards to the consideration of teaching Greg through song: “Give Greg not only the ‘facts,’ but a sense of time and history, of the relatedness of events, an entire (if articifial) framework for thinking and feeling?” What popped out to me was the parenthetical “artificial” and subsequent word “framework.” I might argue that everyone has an “artificial framework” construct of life, one that just happens to be socially agreed upon by most people. So I think this question that Sacks poses, better worded and perhaps vaguer, is: How does one learn/become acclimated into the context they are living in, particularly in anomalous individuals? This is certainly one of the things that Sacks tries to explore, and can be seen in the other cases in An Anthropologist on Mars.