ITHACA, N.Y. -- Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, will deliver a public lecture titled "Creativity and the Brain," Thursday, Sept. 2, at 7:30 p.m. in Statler Auditorium on the Cornell University campus. The talk is free and open to the public. Tickets are required and will be available starting Aug. 26 at the Willard Straight Hall Ticket Office with a limit of two per person.

During his second campus visit as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, Sacks also will visit five classes and deliver a presentation based on his BBC program "Poison in Paradise" to undergraduates in the new Alice Cook House on West Campus.

The son of two physicians, Sacks was born in London and received his medical degree at Oxford University. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States, where he completed an internship at the University of California-San Francisco and a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and at Beth Abraham Hospital.

When Sacks began working in 1966 as a consulting neurologist, he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter, A Kind of Alaska , and the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie Awakenings . Sacks gained international acclaim for his 1985 collection of intriguing neurological case histories titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat . He has received numerous awards and prizes, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his seven books have been translated into 22 languages.

For more information about Sacks' visit to Cornell, contact Gerri Jones at (607) 255-0832 or e-mail her at gaj1@cornell.edu .