Barbara K. Lipska had something incredibly unlikely happen to her — after years of studying the brain, she herself began to experience neurological symptoms. Although it took quite a while for her to realize and then come to terms with the symptoms she was experiencing, this did allow her to eventually be able to describe what the disorders she had been studying for years felt like from within.
“Emotions, which form the foundations of our personalities, are not contained in a single brain region, as once believed, but rather are distributed throughout the brain in a complex network that we don’t yet fully understand.”
There’s two aspects to this book. One is the science — Lipska explains how the brain works, what we know about its diseases and (and it’s a LOT) what we’re still learning. And then there’s her personal story — she had previously battled melanoma, and in 2015 it reoccurred on her frontal lobe. She began experiencing personality changes and memory loss. Diagnosis took a while as Lipska and her family could not identify her personality changes as actual symptoms at first.
I…did not really like this book. I’m trying to put my finger on why. It’s hard to connect with Lipska — her personality just kind of grates. I found myself frustrated with the heavy focus on her feelings and the lack of scientific information. Which sounds snotty, now that I’ve typed it out. I mean, the whole point is seeing what the neurological symptoms look like from the perspective of the patient. But I do think that her story doesn’t fully reflect the mental illnesses she studied in that it was reversible once it was identified, but she tries to draw parallels to schizophrenia and other mental diseases that have no fix at this time.