Le guarigioni del cervello

Content note: discusses some examples you may interpret as animal cruelty. I have pretty mixed feelings about this book. My main response, I guess, is "read with caution". There are some parts which are reasonable, well-founded, and which don't seem to be driven by any bias. Talking about the ways to Leggi tutto

So far this book has taught me two things. 1. That I am far more affected than I expected to be by the phrase "sew a kitten's eyelid closed for three weeks..after which the kitten remained permanently blind in one eye." and 2. Using the word "till" instead of "until" is acceptable in scholarly writin Leggi tutto

في تصوري من أهم الكتب التي تعالج نظرتنا للدماغ بعيداً عن التصورات القديمة التي تعتقد بثبات بنية الدماغ - كما هو الحال في باقي أعضاء الجسم- منذ وقت مبكر من العمر وأن خلايا الدماغ عندما تصاب او تموت لا يمكن استبدالها وأصل هذه النظرية أن الدماغ عبارة عن آلة رائعة مثل ماكينة الحلاقة أو المايكرويف يعمل ب Leggi tutto

Oliver Sacks, he ain't. Despite the back cover blurb from Oliver Sacks, this is definitely a lesser book. There are some interesting things in here, and may be worth a read, even though there was one chapter that I thought was just terrible. But don't go looking here for Sacks' deep humanism and war Leggi tutto

The big idea of the book is the concept of plasticity and how the brain deals with learning and changing multiple skills. In a nutshell each brain function is "fighting" for limited resources, there's only so much mapping space available and what you work on the most gets developed. "Use it or lose

This book was a very interesting read. I found it to be a pretty "light" read, in that the science mumbo-jumbo had been effectively translated into English. But that doesn't mean Doidge's claims are unsupported--throughout the text, and in extensive notes, he cites published research results, giving Leggi tutto