The Brain's Way of Healing: Stories of Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries Hardcover – 29 Jan 2015

Review

Brilliant and highly original. Neurology used to be considered a depressing discipline with patients often displaying fascinating but essentially untreatable symptoms and disabilities. Drawing on the last three decades of research, Doidge challenges this view, using vivid portraits of patients and their physicians. The book is a treasure-trove of the author's own deep insights and a clear bright light of optimism shines through every page (V.S. Ramachandran, neurologist and neuroscientist, author of The Tell-Tale Brain, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition UCSD)

Doidge is the master of explaining how the brain's plasticity can be harnessed to improve the symptoms of brain-related disorders, ranging from stroke to autism (Independent)

This is a book of miracles. Fascinating... An absorbing compendium of unlikely recoveries from physical and mental ailments offers evidence that the brain can heal... brings Oliver Sacks to mind (Lisa Appignanesi Observer)

Exhilarating science... In an era of ever-increasing medicalisation of the human mind, and the medication of it, the appeal of neuroplasticity outlined by Doidge is addictive. It is inspiring, page-turning stuff (Sunday Times)

Doidge is persuasive and curious as a writer, and rigorous as a thinker... what he writes about is at the edge of our current understanding of mind and body (Tim Adams Observer)

In this age of distraction and unnatural environments and actions - like staring at screens all day - brain science offers all kinds of useful techniques to care for our infinitely complex selves. Norman Doidge's work is a Michelin Guide to this hopeful new trove of knowledge and insight (Boston Globe)

An award-winning literary writer and journalist as well as a psychiatrist, Doidge has achieved a fine blend here between scientific substance and literary style. While never dumbing down the science, he's positively elegant in his crystalline explanations of brain science for a lay audience... an essential addition to our growing understanding of the mind-brain-body connection (Toronto Star)

For someone who suffers - or knows someone who suffers - from an injury or illness related to the brain, both this book as well as Doidge's previous will provide information - and perhaps hope - that the brain can heal itself (Seattle Times)

Inspiring... not just a treatise on the brain, it is also beautifully written. By merging scientific information into timeless and fascinating personal stories, Doidge makes his discoveries extremely readable... The Brain's Way of Healing grabs onto the reader at once and compels them to keep reading. This is an important and encouraging book (Vancouver Sun)

About the Author

Norman Doidge, MD, is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and New York Times bestselling author. He is on the Research Faculty at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, in New York, and on the faculty at the University of Toronto's Department of Psychiatry. He and his work have been profiled and cited in, among others, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, Scientific American Mind, Melbourne Age, The Guardian, The Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Psychology Today, O The Oprah Magazine, and the National Review.