This is quite interesting and if in 1966 Sacks was encountering this unusual case of prime numbers in his patients, then this undoubtedly led to his life-long fascination with prime numbers, I suspect. He is well-known to have enjoyed a book on prime numbers published nearly 50 years later, The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics, saying "I could not put it down once I had started." I like to think that two autistic twins inspired in Sacks a life-long enjoyment of this area of mathematics; that random encounters that can shape your thoughts for decades.
Sachs's popular books consistently embellished reality to make a better popular read, and never really got called out on it by the scientific community , perhaps because psychiatry was rather unscientific --or rather pseudodcientific -- thought the early decades of Zach's career. Sachs wasn't exremely harmful in this respect (relative to the horrors of pre-21st century psychiatry, including the folder it gave to the rise of Scientology to prey on The mentally ill), but still provided more infotainment than education.<p>It is interesting that the author claims that getting a 37% guess correct a few times consecutively, in one measured attempt, is unsurprising.