Awakenings

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery

Frank T. Vertosick Jr. · 272 pages

Neurosurgery is an arrogant and yet intensely humbling occupation. Physicists might distill Creation into a few differential equations and biologists see life's wonders in a DNA helix. Only the neurosurgeon actually touches the fleshy incarnation of Nature's greatest mystery - the human brain - and runs the risks that come with it. The true mystery of neurosurgery lies in the lifelines of surgeon

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

Henry Marsh · 278 pages

In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to "do no harm" holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh must make agonizing decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached doctors, thi

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan · 288 pages

The book narrates Cahalan's issues with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and the process by which she was diagnosed with this form of encephalitis. She wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the events of the previous month, during which time she would have violent episodes and delusions. Her eventual diagnosis is made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several theories s

Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science

John Fleischman · 96 pages

Phineas Gage was truly a man with a hole in his head. Phineas, a railroad construction foreman, was blasting rock near Cavendish, Vermont, in 1848 when a thirteen-pound iron rod was shot through his brain. Miraculously, he survived to live another eleven years and become a textbook case in brain science. At the time, Phineas Gage seemed to completely recover from his accident. He could walk, ta

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease

Allan H. Ropper, Brian Burrell · 304 pages

In this book, Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions.

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine

Daniel J. Levitin

The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

Alice W. Flaherty · 321 pages

The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

Norman Doidge · 432 pages

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Brain That Changes Itself presents astounding advances in the treatment of brain injury and illness. In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge described the most important breakthrough in our understanding of the brain in four hundred years: the discovery that the brain can change its own structure and function in response to mental experience-wh

The Man Who Couldn't Stop

David Adam · 324 pages

**An intimate look at the power of intrusive thoughts, how our brains can turn against us, and living with obsessive compulsive disorder** Have you ever had a strange urge to jump from a tall building or steer your car into oncoming traffic? You are not alone. In this captivating fusion of science, history, and personal memoir, David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

Sam Kean · 432 pages

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

Eben Alexander · 196 pages

"A SCIENTIST'S CASE FOR THE AFTERLIFE Near-death experiences, or NDEs, are controversial. Thousands of people have had them, but many in the scientific community have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those people. A highly trained neurosurgeon who had operated on thousands of brains in the course of his career, Alexander knew that what people of faith call the "soul"

The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science

R. Douglas Fields · 371 pages

Despite everything that has been written about the brain, a very important part of this vital organ has been overlooked in most books until now. This book is the story of glia, which make up approximately 85 percent of the cells in the brain. Long neglected as little more than cerebral packing material ("glia" means glue), glia are sparking a revolution in brain science. Glia are completely differ

Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology

Paul Broks · 246 pages

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body

Jo Marchant · 336 pages

"A rigorous, skeptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's extraordinary ability to heal the body ... While we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of "healing thoughts" was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions,

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

V.S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee · 352 pages

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · 571 pages

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

Sherwin B. Nuland · 278 pages

There is a vast literature on death and dying, but there are few reliable accounts of the ways in which we die. The intimate account of how various diseases take away life, offered in How We Die, is not meant to prompt horror or terror but to demythologize the process of dying to help us rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita. Though the avenues of death - AIDS, cancer, heart attack, A

The Man Who Tasted Shapes

Richard E. Cytowic · 296 pages

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande · 280 pages

Explores the efforts of physicians to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of insurmountable obstacles, discussing such topics as the ethical considerations of lethal injections, malpractice, and surgical errors.

The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

Anil Ananthaswamy · 312 pages

"In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, a tour of the latest neuroscience of schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, ecstatic epilepsy, Cotard's syndrome, out-of-body experiences, and other disorders--revealing the awesome power of the human sense of self from a master of science journalism Anil Ananthaswamy's extensive in-depth interviews venture into the lives of individuals who offer perspective

Brain Maker: The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain–for Life

David Perlmutter, Kristin Loberg · 310 pages

Debilitating brain disorders are on the rise-from children diagnosed with autism and ADHD to adults developing dementia at younger ages than ever before. But a medical revolution is underway that can solve this problem: Astonishing new research is revealing that the health of your brain is, to an extraordinary degree, dictated by the state of your microbiome - the vast population of organisms that

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi · 256 pages

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve me

The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body

Frances Ashcroft · 345 pages

A spectacular account of the body electric, showing how, from before conception to the last breath we draw, electrical signals in our cells are essential to everything we think and do.