Cannonball Read 15

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Two books about the brain (kinda)

Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains by Helen Thomson

This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society by Kathleen McAuliffe

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I’ve had a couple of brain books sitting on my shelf for a little while, one (Unthinkable) courtesy of a local Little Free Library, and one (This Is Your Brain on Parasites) courtesy of my husband wanting to qualify for free shipping on an online order. I decided to do a “brain dump” in January, and while neither of these books exactly blew off my Bombas, both contained enough interesting information that I would recommend them if you’re in the mood for some light science. […]

This is your brain on music

Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

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CBR12 BINGO: Music BINGO: Red, How-To, UnCannon, Roaring 20s, Music A 42-year old orthopedic surgeon is hit by lightning and suddenly develops an insatiable passion for piano music. An elderly man with semantic amnesia bursts into song at the slightest provocation. An elderly woman has lived her life unable to “hear” music, which manifests itself to her mind as an intolerable cacophony. These are just a handful of the real individuals we meet in Musicopophilia, Oliver Sacks’s exploration of the interactions between music and the […]

If you don’t love science yet, Sam Kean will win you over

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Drama, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean

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CBR12 BINGO: Gateway Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, and his books don’t get any better than The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. I’ve previously reviewed The Disappearing Spoon and Caesar’s Last Breath for CBR, but I decided to re-read The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons because it’s a perfect “gateway” book into both Kean’s work and popular science. Plus, I’ve had a hankering lately to read some brain stuff. The title refers to a pair of doctors who tended to King Henri II of France after […]

Girl Interrupted

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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As someone who has been both correctly diagnosed and misdiagnosed with conditions concerning my brain, I was really interested in Susannah Cahalan’s story once I heard about it (I’m also just a weird disease junkie in general). Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is a terrifying thing — one of those autoimmune disorders where the body just goes into attack mode on itself for unknown reasons. It results in a cascade of symptoms, starting from something that looks like the flu to a range of major behavior disturbances […]

Just when you thought cancer couldn’t suck any more than it already does

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

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Barbara K. Lipska had already survived two encounters with the dreaded “C” disease when weird things started happening to her brain. In 2009 she fought off breast cancer, undergoing a mastectomy of her left breast, and then, in 2012, she defeated melanoma, or so she thought. That’s the trouble with cancer; you’re never really “cured.” There’s always the chance that it can metastasize somewhere else in your body. For Lipska, a neuroscientist who specializes in studying mental illness, the disease came roaring back in the […]

Sometimes, when a perfectly lovely person is speaking to me, I just want to shout STFU

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Some twenty-odd years ago, I moved out to Southern California from New Jersey and set about finding a job. My wide-eyed self was more than a little delighted when I landed an interview with the Walt Disney Company: the Mouse, the Big Cheese, the place where wishes come true! During the interview process, a Human Resources representative asked me if I was extroverted. “We tend not to hire introverts here,” she said. I nodded sagely; quite understandable–don’t want any of those types around. In my […]



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