Overview

In January 2015, Barbara Lipska--a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness--was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia--and schizophrenia--like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, just as her doctors figured out what was happening, the immunotherapy they had prescribed began to work. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity. In The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind, Lipska describes her extraordinary ordeal and its lessons about the mind and brain. She explains how mental illness, brain injury, and age can change our behavior, personality, cognition, and memory. She tells what it is like to experience these changes firsthand. And she reveals what parts of us remain, even when so much else is gone.

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9781665136655

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Barbara K. Lipska, Ph.D. is director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she studies mental illness and human brain development. A native of Poland, she holds a Ph.D. in medical sciences from the Medical School of Warsaw, and is an internationally recognized leader in human postmortem research and animal modeling of schizophrenia. Before emigrating from Poland to the United States, Dr. Lipska was a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw. She has been at NIMH since 1989 and has published over 120 papers in peer-reviewed journals. A marathon runner and a triathlete, she lives with her husband, Mirek Gorski, in Virginia. Elaine McArdle is a UU World senior editor. An award-winning journalist with more than twenty years of experience, she has written for the Boston Globe and Boston Globe Magazine, Harvard Law Bulletin, Northeastern Law Magazine, and many others. She is a member of First Unitarian Church of Portland, Oregon, where she now lives. Elaine McArdle is a UU World senior editor. An award-winning journalist with more than twenty years of experience, she has written for the Boston Globe and Boston Globe Magazine, Harvard Law Bulletin, Northeastern Law Magazine, and many others. She is a member of First Unitarian Church of Portland, Oregon, where she now lives. Emma Powell is a London-based actor and voice artist that has performed for some of the world's most renowned theater companies including Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida, and The National Theatre, voiced characters for BBC radio dramas, as well as countless audio books, games and ads.

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