Product Review
With detailed case studies reminiscent of Oliver Sachs, combined with extensive interviews with lead researchers, Dr. Norman Doidge, a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Columbia and the University of Toronto, slowly turns everything we thought we knew about the brain upside down with the book, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. He is, perhaps, overenthusiastic about the possibilities, believing that this new science can fix every neurological problem, from learning disabilities to blindness. But Dr. Doidge writes interestingly and engagingly about some of the least understood marvels of the brain.
Dr. Doidge, an eminent psychiatrist and researcher, was struck by how his patients' own transformations belied this, and set out to explore the new science of neuroplasty by interviewing both scientific pioneers in neuroscience, and patients who have benefited from neuro-rehabilitation. Here he describes in fascinating personal narratives how the brain, far from being fixed, has remarkable powers of changing its own structure and compensating for even the most challenging neurological conditions. Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
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