The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind

My Tale of Madness and Recovery

By: Barbara K. Lipska, Elaine McArdle - contributor

Narrated by: Emma Powell

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.

©2018 Barbara K. Lipska and Elaine McArdle (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Inspiring and Informative Personal Story

This story was incredible. Told in the first person, it is an incredible narrative about an incredible experience...one that is almost too fantastic to be believed. Although not specifically about dementia, I gained insight into some of the behaviors I've witnessed in others with dementia and/or Alzheimers. It was so inspiring, that it gave me a new perspective on what I might do if I was given a diagnosis that seemed insurmountable. Barbara Lipska, the subject of the story, is one of the world's most impressive women.

My only complaint is the narrator...not that she wasn't great - she was expressive and sincere with a great amount of emotion...it's just that this is a first-person narrative...about a woman who grew up in Poland; has lived and worked in the US for 20-30 years when this takes place; has grown, US-born children, who also can speak Polish; yet her story is narrated by someone with an English accent. As you imagine this woman telling her story, you keep imagining her as an Englishwoman (especially when she says "shed-uled" or "CON-tri-bute" or other English pronunciations), until something about Barbara's Polish heritage comes up. Again - she is an excellent narrator, but I would definitely have preferred hearing someone with a Polish-accented American accent tell Barbara's story.

Cancer in the Brain

This is an amazing telling of a Neuroscientists journey into the madness caused by melanoma in her brain. Already having fought breast cancer, she was now fighting brain cancer. This was very personal for me, having lost a lifelong freind to metastatic breast cancer in her brain.
I am a nurse with interest in brain plasticity when faced with disease or trauma. The possibilites of recovery and survival are almost as different as the patients who journey. Medication can be as cruel as the disease. This was an awesome story of posibility, courage, determination and the cruel reality of disease for any patient or family. While I would never recommend the risk she took in concealing known medical information, I wonder if she ever revealed it to her physician since it would alter the trial information. It was hard to stop listening.
Thank you for sharing your story!

So interesting.

It's not often that you get to hear an account of mental decay from the person who suffered it, especially when that person is a neuroscientist. You should take it when given the chance.

a thorough look into why she went mad

A great book that was technical but not so technical that laymen wouldn't appreciate it

wonderful

I loved the entire story. It was up and down, but the narration was great.

Such insight and vulnerability!

I truly appreciate the raw vulnerability shared in this book. She gave great details about the struggle during her process and also how it affected her family. Great book!!!

This narrator? Not a fan.

I am giving this book a 5/5 because of its genre: memoir in a medical/science setting. My favorites! Medical and psych details of this book are thoroughly presented, though at times seeming a bit "dumbed down". I would guess this is to simplify the story and give non-medical readers a handle on the brain and all its vast capabilities. Plus it helps to move the story fast without dwelling on small or technical details. I am part of that "non-medical" audience, but I am also an armchair medical geek, and would have enjoyed a more technical focus.

The choice of the narrator doesn't make sense to me, due to her voice, which sounds too old for this protagonist. She has quite a well-defined British tonality and speech cadence and I don't get the reason for driving the story using such a colloquial accent. Compare this narrator to the contemporary professional voice from "Still Alice" and "Every Note Played", where the voice is calm, straightforward, professional and appropriate for a skilled neuroscientist.

But I did manage to accustom my ears to this sound, so that after a certain point I could ignore it.

I especially could not buy this character sounding like a children's book reader. Very juvenile and almost like she is talking down to her audience, not realistic in my view.

I do recommend this book with my five stars, but with the warning that the voice is not consistent with the story and the sing song dialog requires a huge suspension of disbelief.

Lyrical nonfiction

This is an outstanding memoir of Barbara Lipska, a scientist who runs a brain bank and becomes a brain tumor patient. This book gives the reader good insight into how mental illness is influenced by physical conditions within the brain. The first part of her journey through diagnosis and various treatments is told in a lyrical way. We meet her supportive family and see them struggle when Barbara’s tumors cause her to experience schizophrenia. Hearing her view of that time vs. how she seems to her family is painfully fascinating. Excellent narration makes this Audible offering first class!

Touching journey into madness

Fascinating journey through the mind from sanity, to insanity, then back again. For all she knew about the brain, she still often could not see that what was happening to her was not normal for her, partly because her actions were sometimes just more extreme versions of what she regularly did. What does that tell us about how the brain works? Good question that yet remains to be discovered. It's amazing she could recover from so many cancerous tumors. On the flip side, I got a bit tired of constantly hearing about how she and her family were all great athletes. Then again, it's just who they were. Overall a wonderful and interesting book.

Inspiring Story

Finding a way to deal with what life has dealt you is the driving force behind this book. The author's true-life story of her extraordinary circumstances gave me a new understanding of mental illness and how its effects can be ignored for a long time when the person experiencing a breakdown continues to function well and has the knowledge to deny what is happening. Her ability to take us through the labyrinth and find a way to continue to look forward and remain hopeful—not knowing what the future will bring is inspiring.