I’m a physician and a writer. Together, they create a matrix of practice, research, and writing. I care for patients at the Penn Memory Center and am a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach and study topics at the intersections of bioethics, aging, and the neurosciences. I wrote The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It and the novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont and essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Hill, STAT, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I raise whippets, and I’m a passionate reader of the physician and poet John Keats.
This first-person account of living with a biomarker-defined diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is a clearly written story of two very distinct, even antagonistic experiences. There’s the highly subjective experience of being a patient and the highly objective experience of being a physician who has diagnosed and cared for persons with the same disease. In one book is one narrative of two perspectives embodied in one person. The result is an unadorned account of what it’s like to lose one’s mind just a little bit at a time. Case in point is his account of apathy. I’m routinely prescribing this book to my patients.
Dr Daniel Gibbs is one of 50 million people worldwide with an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Unlike most patients with Alzheimer's, however, Dr Gibbs worked as a neurologist for twenty-five years, caring for patients with the very disease now affecting him. Also unusual is that Dr Gibbs had begun to suspect he had Alzheimer's several years before any official diagnosis could be made. Forewarned by genetic testing showing he carried alleles that increased the risk of developing the disease, he noticed symptoms of mild cognitive impairment long before any tests would have alerted him. In this highly personal account, Dr Gibbs…
I like trying to solve problems about the mind: Is the mind just the brain? What is consciousness, and where is it in the brain? What happens in the brain during aesthetic experience? Why are we prone to self-deception? In approaching these questions, I don’t limit myself to one discipline or set of techniques. These mental phenomena, and the problems that surround them, do not hew to our disciplinary boundaries. In spite of this, someone needs to collect, analyze, and assess information relevant to the problems—which is in many different formats—and build theories designed to make sense of it. During that time, more data will become available, so back you go.
V. S. Ramachandran is a gifted experimentalist and writer who does not hesitate to pursue deep and important questions about our minds. Rather than employing expensive imaging or large sample sizes, he is more likely to use a cardboard box, an old stereopticon, or a rubber hand in his experiments.
His creativity in finding concrete ways to test seemingly vague but interesting claims about our minds has led to several breakthroughs, in our understanding of phantom limbs and our ability to treat phantom pain, and also in our study or synesthesia—cases in which people see numbers as having colors, for example.
As I can attest, he is able to transmit to his students the idea that pursuing scientific questions can thrilling, fulfilling, and so much fun that you can’t wait to get to work in the morning.
In this landmark work, V. S. Ramachandran investigates strange, unforgettable cases-from patients who believe they are dead to sufferers of phantom limb syndrome. With a storyteller's eye for compelling case studies and a researcher's flair for new approaches to age-old questions, Ramachandran tackles the most exciting and controversial topics in brain science, including language, creativity, and consciousness.
I started as a designer, patented inventor, and creator in the fashion, toy, and film industries, but after the early diagnosis of my young children on the spectrum, both “late talkers,” diagnosed with multiple disorders including apraxia, I entered the world of nonprofit, research, and advocacy. I am the founder of the nonprofit Cherab Foundation where I've been outreaching for over twenty years. I've hosted numerous conferences including the first for apraxia overseen by a medical director from NIH who reviewed my protocol – the use of fish oils as a therapeutic intervention, published research on my patented nutritional intervention IQed Smart Nutrition, and co-authored the book The Late Talker to share my proven protocol and help others achieve the best possible results for their communication impaired children.
Sensory processing disorder or SPD is a difficult condition to explain as it can involve one or more of any of our senses, so can present differently in each child. It would be considered one of the neurological “soft signs” meaning that a diagnosis of SPD typically means there is more going on than a simple developmental lag. Today the majority of children diagnosed with apraxia also have coexisting soft signs such as SPD, hypotonia (low tone), and/or motor deficits in the body. It’s important if apraxia is diagnosed or suspected to take your child to either a pediatric neurologist or developmental pediatrician to confirm or rule out soft signs in the body.
When Tanner was little and his only “words” were “mmm” or “ma” we were at the Chelsea Piers in NYC. Tanner had a sensory meltdown and if you’ve never seen one it can be very intense. His…
The groundbreaking book that explains Sensory Processing Difference (SPD)–and presents a drug-free approach that offers hope for parents–now revised and updated.
Does your child exhibit…
Over-responsivity–or under-responsivity–to touch or movement? A child with SPD may be a “sensory avoider,” withdrawing from touch, refusing to wear certain clothing, avoiding active games–or he may be a “sensory disregarder,” needing a jump start to get moving.
Over-responsivity–or under-responsivity–to sounds, sights taste, or smell? She may cover her ears or eyes, be a picky eater, or seem oblivious to sensory cues.
Cravings for sensation? The “sensory craver” never gets enough of certain sensations, e.g.,…
I love books that keep me up at night. I'm constantly trying to get into a good, healthy bedtime routine—but I am also constantly sabotaging that effort by finding books that I simply can’t put down. The feeling of being drawn so deep into a story that the hours slip away is easily one of my favorite feelings in the world. I also love books that make me wake up in the middle of the night, books that slide into my brain and plant new ideas there. As an author, I am always striving to write those books. I can think of no higher compliment than “I stayed up all night reading it.”
When I was a kid I was very excited about wolves. Not in the sense that I knew a lot about wolves—I didn’t study them and learn about them—so much as I felt certain, in my heart of hearts, that if I met a wolf, we would understand each other in a way no two creatures ever have. Feed Them Silence is a book that returned me to that sense of certainty, but with a more fundamentally realistic understanding of the nature of animals as existing outside of human understanding. I couldn’t put it down, and the hours slipped right past me.
Lee Mandelo dives into the minds of wolves in Feed Them Silence, a novella of the near future.
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s case, to be in-kind with one of the last remaining wild wolves? Using a neurological interface to translate her animal subject’s perception through her own mind, Sean intends to chase both her scientific curiosity and her secret, lifelong desire to experience the intimacy and freedom of wolfishness. To see the world through animal eyes; smell the forest, thick with olfactory messages; even taste the blood and viscera…
Laurie grew up in a rural community and had the good fortune of working with kind and dedicated teachers who were both skillful pedagogues and encouraging mentors. Their passion for quality teaching and high-level musicianship instilled in Laurie the powerful relationship between teaching and artistic performance. Cornelia dreamed of playing the cello beautifully but didn’t have a real teacher until she was twenty. While the work required relearning almost everything she thought she knew, she was old enough to observe her own transformation, guided by a thoughtful and dedicated teacher, and teaching and performing became the inseparable “two sides of the same coin.”They've worked together ever since, writing, teaching, presenting, and sharing great ideas.
Neurologist Frank Wilson wrote this smart, funny, insightful book to connect his understanding of neuroscience to his own experience learning to play the piano as an adult.
While sharing his expertise about neural pathways and auditory perception, he pokes fun at himself, offers amusing anecdotes about other “experts” in various fields, writes lymmerics, and makes jokes when you least expect it: “We all know about biceps, triceps, deltoids, and ‘pecs’ but who ever heard of somebody having a knockout set of abductor digiti quinti minimi, or a breathtaking flexor pollicis brevis?”
His light touch creates an engaging and enlightening balance of science and music, and one can’t help but be encouraged by his enthusiasm and love of learning.
A neurologist and amateur musician explores the connections between neurology and music and provides an informative look into how and why people make music, how human beings hear music, and how musicians remember what they're playing
I loved bars before I could drink. Maybe it was a steady diet of Cheers reruns as a child. Or perhaps it was growing up in Los Angeles, a city without a center, a city of cars, a city that seemed—at least when I was a child—to lack real community. Bars, in my imagination, provided that. So when I started actually finding myself in bars—and often working in them—I also found myself writing fiction, and those bars ended up in that fiction. In each of my novels, a bar is a gathering place for those wanting a church sans theology, a place, where, yes, everyone knows your name.
On any given day, this is my favorite book with one of my favorite bars, The Vine, a dive that Johnson describes as “like a railroad club car that had somehow run itself off the tracks into a swamp of time where it awaited the blows of the wrecking ball.” Is it a nice place? No. Would you take a date here? Not if you wanted them to respect you. Could you find yourself in mortal danger? Absolutely. But amongst the addicts and runaways, the small-time crooks and ne’er do wells, you’ll find moments of beauty that transcend the pain of everyday life, becoming, in its best moments, like reading scripture.
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made brilliantly lucid by these drugs. In the course of his adventures, he meets an assortment of people, who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Our of their bleak, seemingly…
I’ve always had equally balanced interests in the arts/humanities and the natural sciences. I like to think that I inherited much of this from my analytical “algebraic” mother, who was a nurse and tended to our family finances, and my holistic “geometrical” father, who was a carpenter. It’s probably no accident that my double major in college was in physics and philosophy...and, down the line, that I should develop a focused interest in human brain laterality, where the division between analysis and holism is so prominent.
Utilizing data from split-brain patients (whose left and right cerebral hemispheres had been surgically separated), the authors of this book focus on how our “two minds” yield a unitary consciousness.
This is the book that first lit the fire of inquiry for me. The whole idea was to understand the “integrated” mind by first understanding the minds of individuals that had been divided by severing the corpus callosum (which connected their two cerebral hemispheres) in order to alleviate medically intractable epilepsy.
It was suggested that in such individuals, their “minds” were divided as well. Yet some later studies did suggest that some intercommunication (through other channels) did survive.
In this book we are trying to illuminate the persistent and nag ging questions of how mind, life, and the essence of being relate to brain mechanisms. We do that not because we have a commit ment to bear witness to the boring issue of reductionism but be cause we want to know more about what it's all about. How, in deed, does the brain work? How does it allow us to love, hate, see, cry, suffer, and ultimately understand Kepler's laws? We try to uncover clues to these staggering questions by con sidering the results of our studies on…
Losing something is exceedingly difficult to accept, however, in sharing my story I hope it gives the personal motivation to recover the things that have been taken away. There is light in a tunnel you just must find it, my story I hope gives you that light.
There were numerous articles I have read regarding the nervous system however, the most memorable book I read would be Clinical Neurology. It contained the information I required with it being an easy read, it provided clinically relevant information with an easy-to-follow guide that was outlined in the chapters. From my perspective student material relating to neurology have the best learning format of the material that is being presented like in this book.
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The clearest, most concise coverage of one of the most complex topics in medicine-updated with the latest advances in the field
Clinical Neurology, Eleventh Edition, provides a comprehensive overview of basic and clinical neurology in a concise, digestible format. It links clinical neuroscience to current approaches for accurately diagnosing and effectively treating neurologic disorders. Covering all the advances in molecular biology and genetics, this popular guide emphasizes history-taking and neurologic examination as the…
I’m a writer who loves all kinds of fiction, but I’m most passionate about magical realism and related genres (like fabulism and speculative fiction). I love when writers skirt several genres, especially when their use of the “strange” holds a funhouse mirror up to our world and allows us to see a deeper truth. My favorite writers craft prose that rivals poetry and delve into their characters’ interior worlds; for me, one of fiction’s greatest magic tricks is the ability to enter another’s world and create empathy. The five authors on this list do all of these things and more, and they serve as some of my greatest inspirations.
This was one of the books (along with Anthony Doerr’sThe Shell Collector) that inspired me to pursue fiction writing rather than poetry.
For the longest time, poetry was my preferred genre, and while I had dabbled in writing fiction, I struggled. It wasn’t until readingThe Girl in the Flammable Skirt near the end of my undergrad that I realized fiction doesn’t have to be straight realism—it can be magical, strange, symbolic, weird, fabulist, dreamlike.
Two of Bender’s stories that had the most impact on me were “The Rememberer,” where the narrator’s lover experiences reverse evolution,” and “Drunken Mimi,” a love story between an imp and a mermaid. Maybe not coincidentally, my book also contains a story about a mermaid.
In The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Aimee Bender has created a world where nothing is quite as it seems. From a man suffering from reverse evolution to a lonely wife who waits for her husband to return from war; to a small town where one girl has a hand made of fire and another has one made of ice. These stories of men and women whose lives are shaped and sometimes twisted by the power of extraordinary desires take us to a place far beyond the imagination.
It might sound pretentious but I want to know the truth about life. I want a book to tell me the truth, to open me up to it, and to spark me off. I want to feel woken up, shook up.
The Matter With Things is, I believe, one of the most important books written in the last 50 years, no, the last 100 years! It’s magnus opus in two weighty volumes, but just open one chapter and read it and you’ll be shaken awake. I read the whole of volume two.
It’s a remarkable work of great and enduring importance. Like all great ideas McGilchrist’s ‘hemisphere hypothesis’ has remarkable explanatory power – from art to love, philosophy to God, mental illness to the transcendental.
In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces - ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today. Who are we? What is the world? How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time? Is the cosmos without purpose or value? Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?
In doing so, he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain's left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to…
