The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind

Finished July 19
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery by Barbara K. Lipska with Elaine McArdle

This memoir is a fascinating look at one experience with aggressive brain cancer that beat the odds. Lipska is the director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States, and spent her career studying mental illness from a neuroscience perspective. She had already survived breast cancer and melanoma, when her melanoma returned, this time in her brain. The symptoms she exhibited as she went through diagnosis and treatment were similar to those of people with dementia and schizophrenia.
Due to her career, connections, and family, she was able to call on experts and become aware of new treatments early in the process. Her husband Mirek is a computer engineer. Her daughter Kasia is an endocrinologist at the Yale School of Medicine. Her son Witek is a neuroscientist in the Brain Modulation Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Her sister Maria is a physicist and chief of therapy in the radiation oncolology department at Brighton and Women's Hospital in Boston. The symptom that led to the discovery of her tumours was a loss of vision in one part of her visual field. She knew to get to a doctor and received an MRI the next day, which showed the tumours. Her entire family started doing the research of treatments, and she was able to get accepted into a experimental treatment program that included immunotherapy.
She was able to recover memories from her worst times with the tumours after she recovered and put those together with the observations of her family to create this book, detailing her own viewpoint as well as what others saw, giving a unique insight into the entire experience.
Some of the experiences were extremely frightening to read, including the independence she was still insistent on when she was highly impaired.
A fascinating read.

The Future of the Mind

Finished November 22
The Future of the Mind: the Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku

This book is wide-ranging in ints scope. It is organized into three main sections. The first section deals with understanding the mind. It looks at the mind and consciousness, exploring what we know about the mind and how we view consciousness.
The second section covers enhancing the mind, going beyond what is traditionally thought of. This covers using the mind to communicate (telepathy), using the mind to control matter (telekinesis), memory control and thought direction, and enhancing intelligence.
The third section covers empowerment. Topics including dreams, controlling what we think and how we use our mind, altered states of consciousness, artificial minds and the nature of them, the different projects now underway to reverse engineer the brain, what the future may hold for our understanding, enhancement and use of the mind, the mind as a form of energy, and alien minds and what they might look like,
There is also a short appendix on quantum consciousness, Kaku's own topic of research. The book includes a list of further reading suggestions as well.
There is a lot to think about here. I learned a lot and started thinking in new ways about some of these topics. The book is very well-written, and easy for a layman to understand.

The Shallows

Finished May 28
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr, read by Paul Michael Garcia

I found this book fascinating. It isn't just about the internet and its influence on our physical brains and the way we think, although it is about that. It begins with a history of human communication, from oral storytelling, through the introduction of writing and reading, to the invention of the printing press, through newer media like movies, radio and television, showing how each change in communication resulted in changes to the way we think, and how we use our brains. It also has discussions around philosophy and how thought processes have changed. It looks at the science of research on the brain and the different viewpoints of what makes us human. It talks about the trend to refer to human functions in a machine-related way, and how machines replacing human functions affects us physically and mentally. Carr talks about his own experiences having difficulty in reading and writing with depth as he used the internet more, and how hard he found it to limit the time he spent online. Backed up by many different research studies that took place over many years, his arguments offer both hope and warning for the future. Highly recommended.

Check out this video about it.

Tangles

Finished August 10
Tangles: a story about Alzheimer's, my mother and me by Sarah Leavitt
This graphic memoir is written in a very open manner, documenting Sarah's mother's early onset Alzheimer's. We see not only Sarah's reactions to the disease affecting her mother, but also the rest of the family's. Sarah is very open about the issues, the struggles, and the emotions present here. The drawing really make things come alive. We see the emotions in people's faces and the struggles her mother and the rest of the family faced. This is a book that can open up discussions around this difficult health issue for many families, breaking through the barriers of fear and denial that often come up.
There is nothing that seeing that you are not alone in what you are going through to help with mental health around this for the caregivers.

A Look at One Woman's Case

Finished April 11
The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt
Siri is a novelist and essayist who suffered a violent episode of shaking while speaking at a memorial to her father in 2006. Despite her entire body shaking and flapping, she spoke clearly and continued her speech. To her "the shaking woman" came on unexpectedly and she did not identify with her or know the cause of the episode. At first she thought it was an anomaly, but when it happened to her again, she knew it was something she had to figure out. Through a process of medication and talk, Siri was able to deal with the onset of these episodes, but in investigating them, she delves into her own mental and nervous history, as well as the general history of nervous disorders.
This book documents that research and touches on many things from empathy to epilepsy, synaesthesia to psychoanalysis. I was fascinated by the different experiences she found and the way she dealt with her own episodes. This is a frank and honest look at a still undefined medical area.

The Reading Brain

Finished June 15
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
This was an absolutely fascinating read and I learned so much about both the history of reading and what goes on in our brains as we gain this function.
As Wolf says, our brains were not designed for reading, but have adapted to achieve this skill. Reading uses several parts of the brain and depends on the functionality of each of those parts as well as the connections between them to succeed. Learning to read has some differences depending on the language of the reader, and that can affect the speed at which the skill is developed as well as what parts of the brain are more heavily used.
Wolf also addresses the issue of dyslexia, and talks about the different forms that this disability takes. There are different ways this can be addressed depending on what type of dyslexia the student has. She also addresses the problems of catching this early to both address it properly and to ensure the child does not feel stigmatized. Many people with dyslexia are very creative and innovative and we don't want them to feel inferior to their peers.
Wolf includes a discussion relating back to Socrates and his stand against reading as a lesser form of learning that could lead to a false sense of understanding a subject or idea. She discusses how this change from learning by dialogue to learning by reading can be related to today's change to learning through digital tools and how similar concerns may be applicable to our young learners now.
This book should be a must-read for teachers that will give them an insight to the issues that can exist around reading. I highly recommend it.