Book Review: The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind

As I read The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind by Barbara K. Lipska, I was looking

forward to a medical memoir with the promise of something more. It is the story of a brain scientist who finds out she has multiple tumors that have spread to her brain from a previous melanoma diagnosis. She learns of the tumor as a result of an MRI after part of her field of vision disappears.

On one hand, the book is a pretty standard medical memoir. She becomes sick, needs and undergoes treatment and we are not sure if she will make it. There is actually a lot of suspense in just that narrative and this is the part of the book I like best, being a regular reader of these types of memoirs.

But since Lipska studies the brain, this story provides an extra layer of insight into how someone who knows the brain would experience its breakdown. As someone who is interested in the brain and who experienced a tumor herself, I was also interested in this aspect of the story.

The book starts out during one of Lipska’s episodes when her brain is riddled with tumors, where she is not acting like herself. Later she will liken these episodes to “mental illness” or “madness”. She is running through the neighborhood after just dying her hair, the dye running down her neck.