Whilst a novel is no more than an arrangement of words on a page something beyond the page happens if the arrangement is skilful. (Art is what remains once you've deconstructed all the ways the artwork was built; art is the remainder, the trace.) What happens when the arrangement is ill considered or goes awry is that the story fails to communicate.

Storytelling is also something we do everyday simply to understand ourselves. We understand our lives in a narrative way, we understand how our story interacts with other stories, and we tell stories about our own stories and the stories of other people. What happens when the arrangement of our own stories goes awry, when our story fails to communicate to others and to ourselves, can be very scary. Truly, this way madness lies: madness is our life story scrambled.

So, how best to understand this madness? Via a retelling of the stories of stories that have gone wrong. Enter Oliver Sacks.

Re-reading books like Awakenings, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (TMWMHWFAH) and An Anthropologist on Mars, as I have been doing recently, is a delight and an honour. Few scientists equal Sacks' way with words. Few have explained neurological dysfunction in as affecting a way. Few have made it so clear that losing ourselves in our narrative about ourselves can be a living Kafkaesque nightmare.

Let's be clear: Sacks is not R.D. Laing. He makes it very clear that the visual agnosia he is describing, in TMWMHWFAH, is an organic disease. There isn't something wilful about the way these patients' stories aren't cohering. But, despite themselves, because of the disease, they aren't -- and the bewilderment that Sacks so clearly describes is the result.

The stories Sacks tells about these stories have a quality that we normally only associate with the great artists. There is something Proustian about Awakenings (1973). Using the drug L-Dopa a group of patients affected by the sleeping-sickness epidemic of the 1920s is brought back to life. They experience life in a profoundly vivid way. And, suddenly, we do too. Their story entwines with our story and we realise that most of the time we just don't pay enough attention to what is going on. We get a share of their epiphany: but our realisation is as short-lived as the patients. They fall asleep again. As, in a sense, do we.

Sacks is a moralist: he reminds us of the ethical duty to pay attention. Something we can learn when we read him telling the stories of these life-stories. And something we can also learn about when we listen to the stories everyone everywhere has to tell.

[Mark Thwaite is the founder and managing editor of ReadySteadyBook. He is also the managing editor of The Book Depository website]