Signing Up for Language : Books: In ‘Seeing Voices,’ Oliver Sacks explores what it means to be deaf and to be without language, the software of human thought.

Oliver Sacks is both exhausted and exhilarated. His body advises him to sit, enjoy a cup of coffee or an apple, and relax. But his mind will not listen.

Sacks has arrived at the California School for the Deaf, widely praised for its progressive teaching philosophy, and despite a tiring cross-country flight and a restless night’s sleep, the veteran researcher’s unquenchable curiosity insists on a lightning tour.

Not long ago, Sacks--neurologist, professor and best-selling author--may not have crossed the street to visit a school for the deaf, much less driven himself to exhaustion. That changed when he wrote “Seeing Voices.”

“Voices,” subtitled “A Journey Into the World of the Deaf” (University of California Press), is Sacks’ fifth book, and his first since the best-selling “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” in 1986.

It is also Sacks’ first book based on neither his own personal or clinical experience (he is a professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York), but on the insights, research and experiences of others. In it, he has explored what it means to be deaf--and, by extension, what it means to be without language, the software of human thought.

Readers share Sacks’ interest. A first printing of 50,000 copies was sold in two weeks, making “Voices” the best-selling general-interest book in University of California Press history, said spokeswoman Denise Cicourel.

“It’s our big book of the year--maybe our big book of the century,” said Stanley Holwitz of UC Press’ Los Angeles office. Holwitz, a friend of Sacks, brought Sacks back to the academic publishing house--where general-interest titles normally sell from 5,000 to 25,000 copies--after working with him on a revised edition of Sacks’ 1970 book, “Migraine.”

Holwitz saw the seed of a book in two essays Sacks wrote for the New York Review of Books on deaf history and the campus revolt last year when students demanded more deaf administrators at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world’s only four-year liberal arts college for the deaf.

“Oliver has a compulsion about writing; if you want an essay of 2,000 words, he will deliver 12,000,” Holwitz said, “so I knew he was ready to write more.”

Sacks was interested in writing more, and writing for Holwitz at UC Press. But first there was the small matter of his contract with Summit Books, which had published “Hat.” Summit did eventually release Sacks from that contract, but Holwitz said he believes Sacks will return to Summit following the “Voices” publicity tour.

During a quick visit to the San Francisco Bay Area last week, Sacks sought out members of the region’s active deaf community, centered in Fremont and Berkeley, and engaged them in discussions over the best way to teach deaf people--and the best way to learn from them.

“Deaf people may find themselves more linguistically sophisticated than hearing people,” he said. “I have spoken since I was an infant, for example, but I never really thought about language until I started writing this book. Deaf people think about sign language in a way we never think about English.”

That is, in part, he says, because deafness gives the deaf a taste of the somewhat unimaginable handicap and isolation of being unable to communicate in any way with others--or, in a real sense, with oneself, since some form of language is essential to higher forms of internal thought.

But there is even more to it than that. As Sacks says, deaf people may think in an entirely new--and, in some ways, better--fashion than the hearing. Sacks calls it “a new form of visual intelligence.”

“My feeling--and it is only a hunch--is that there are some things that lend themselves more to signing and some things that lend themselves more to English,” he told an auditorium full of deaf students and their teachers in Fremont.

Supporting this thesis are research experiments and practical experiences in which hearing, English-speaking people also learn and use American Sign Language (or, as Sacks prefers, simply Sign). Each of those languages has its own distinct attributes, he writes, and bilingual people often jump back and forth between them, shopping for the language best suited for the idea being expressed.

For example, English, being more abstract and linear, is more effective at metaphor and intellectual inquiry, while Sign, being more iconic and spatial, is better at conveying context and emotion.

In his travels among deaf communities from Martha’s Vineyard off Massachusetts to Fremont, Sacks confirmed this himself in bilingual people. He found some, for example, who chatted in English but joked in Sign. Others, he noted with amazement, sat placidly in easy chairs and on porch swings, their hands twitching slightly in their laps. They were daydreaming in Sign.

“With Sign, there is a special playfulness in narrative and thought,” said Sacks, whose own halting training in sign language has been interrupted while he promotes the book.

“There is a terrible paradox here. There is no one worse at languages than I am,” he said. “My father was very gregarious and outgoing while my mother was great at learning vocabulary and rules but never able to speak a word. I’m afraid I rather take after her.”

On his most recent return to the Bay Area--the London native interned at a San Francisco hospital in the early 1960s--Sacks was eager to zip down to the California School for the Deaf. His book praises the small, residential school for advocating early and complete education of deaf children, embracing Sign, and encouraging its students to pursue their interests as vigorously as do their hearing peers.

He also has high praise for Fremont itself, a Silicon Valley suburb with an unusual degree of integration among its deaf and hearing residents. Here, many deaf people are an integral part of the local arts community and government, and many hearing people are learning Sign to expand their social and financial opportunities.

“There are some deaf people who say, with a smile, that they can no longer tell secrets in restaurants,” because so many hearing people in town have learned Sign, said school administrator Diane Morton.

Treating deaf people as people might not seem unusual. But, as Sacks details in “Seeing Voices,” it is.

His book is actually a series of three essays, the longest of which is the summation of research into the fundamental importance of language to mental development--an importance illustrated by several clinical tales of deaf children denied all language skills until they are of school age.

This phenomenon usually results in permanently impaired language skills, he writes, and is a big reason why so many otherwise capable and intelligent deaf people read and write at no more than a fourth-grade level.

“The greatest calamity for deaf people is to be denied access to language when they most need it, before the age of 4 or 5,” he told Fremont students, many of whom brought copies of Sacks’ book for his signature.

“The denial may not be intentional. It may be just the result of exposure to a language not easily understood” by a deaf child--that is, English or a tedious derivative called Signed English.

Denying language, and thus education, to a child may seem barbaric, but Sacks asserts it actually was--and, in too many cases, still is--quite common.

Such abuse is chronicled in the book’s first essay, a brief but impassioned history of deaf people in Western society. In it, Sacks recalls how for centuries deaf men and women, who as children were improperly denied an education, endured unthinkable discrimination. Among other injustices, the deaf were forbidden to own property or inherit it; they were denied work and prevented from marrying.

Enlightenment for the deaf flickered first in Paris in the 18th Century, Sacks recounts. There, priests first challenged a popular assumption that the deaf were incapable of learning, then recognized the genius of the informal sign language of the streets and standardized it for teaching to others.

Laurent Clerc, a deaf French teacher, brought sign language to America in 1816 at the request of the Rev. Thomas Gallaudet, a Connecticut minister who was determined to nurture the intelligence he recognized in a neighbor’s deaf daughter. Together, they founded the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford and used informal native signs to develop what is now American Sign Language. Gallaudet University, the world’s only four-year liberal arts college for the deaf, is named after that visionary New England cleric.

Education of the deaf--the key to a full and decent life, and for Sacks a goal tied closely to the use of Sign--flowered and died as a social priority on several occasions in the intervening decades. With each historical retreat from that “visual language” of the deaf, Sacks writes sadly of “egregious” and “notorious” reformers who--wrongheadedly, he argues--sought to straitjacket the deaf with what was for them an unwieldy language, English.

Despite his evident passion for early education, preferably in Sign, Sacks holds himself out as an arbitrator, not an advocate of any education theories. “The purpose of my book is to urge reflection,” he said. “I am not a pusher of ideas.”

Indeed, on the way to Fremont, he recalled a confrontation the night before with “angry and anguished” parents of deaf children at a Berkeley bookstore. The parents, he said, were opposed to Sign because they felt it would exclude their children from intercourse with hearing people.

“They were saying, ‘Why are you trying to kidnap our children into the world of the deaf?’ ” he said, looking pained at the thought of having upset so many people. “The answer is, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ I could not make them see the critical importance of giving children language--any language--early in their lives, to let them learn.”

Sacks explains that his affinity for Sign is based on the ability of deaf students to learn that language in a matter of months, compared to the 10 or 15 years of difficult and tedious training needed for a congenitally deaf person to learn to speak English.

“Language development is a critical part of human development,” he said. “Acquiring language is a central part of being human, and a central part of neurological development.”

Even though deaf people themselves greet Sacks warmly--students at Fremont collected around him to discuss his work and seek his opinions--the previous night’s confrontation with the hearing parents of deaf children still weighed heavily on him. He said he did not sleep well, and finally telephoned his friend, Gallaudet linguistics professor Robert Johnson, seeking counsel on the subject.

Sacks clearly prefers consensus to confrontation. Along with a shoehorn, for example, he carries in his briefcase a room thermometer, which he said he uses to cut short any disagreements over whether the temperature in any particular room is too warm for comfort.

“I have this idealistic view that if I could only get people to listen to one another, they would not be at each other’s throats,” he said, then added with a smile: “Of course, maybe if they really did (listen), they would be at each other’s throats more often.”

Despite this disdain for disputes, Sacks carries a rainbow of colored pens, with which he frequently jots observations and ideas in a worn green notebook. Different colored pens, he explained, let him argue with himself.

“Voices” is filled with such personal debate. Several of the book’s 98 footnotes contradict the main text. At one point, for example, he writes that deaf people “live in a world of utter, unbroken soundlessness and silence.” His own footnote snipes: “This is the stereotypical view, and is not altogether true. The congenitally deaf do not experience or complain of ‘silence’ (any more than the blind experience or complain of ‘darkness’).”

“I’m trying to present all sides,” he said. Besides, he added, “I think in footnotes and asides and tangents. Why shouldn’t I write that way?”

No reason at all. In fact, it fits perfectly with the impression one gets of Sacks as a brilliant and charming but rumpled and somewhat absent-minded academic. He could easily be cast as everyone’s favorite professor, one whose lectures are scribbled on paper scraps bulging out of every pocket, one who somehow makes even the most arcane topics not only accessible but fun.