Title: The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: And Other Inspiring Stories of Pioneering Brain Transformation
Author: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young
Publisher: Post Hypnotic Press
Year: 2012
288 pages
Narrator: Lisa Bunting
Length: 9 hours, 13 minutes
Free review copy provided by Audiobook Jukebox.
This is a tremendously interesting and hopeful book about brain plasticity, and it's no surprise that Norman Doidge (The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science) wrote the introduction. Like Doidge, Arrowsmith-Young uses both life stories and more technical material to tell stories of opportunities to improve cognitive functioning for people with serious to severe learning disabilities, brain damage, and other forms of brain-related disability. Arrowsmith-Young incorporates her own stories throughout the book. Her descriptions are clear and evocative in the style of the best of Oliver Sacks's neurological case studies.
Over the course of the book, the reader learns about the newer and more hopeful model of plasticity and relearning (or differently learning), not to accommodate problems so much as to address the deficits that lead to them. A variety of exemplar stories are included, most about pupils at Arrowsmith-Young's school. There are intriguing glimpses of the actual interventions used. I would have enjoyed more technical detail, but the inclusion of that material may have made the book more difficult for a non-professional to read, especially in audiobook format. Indeed, some examples were hard to follow as a listener rather than a print reader. Lisa Bunting reads clearly and that clarity helped me to follow examples that would have been easier on the page.
Recommended for readers who enjoy popular biological science, those who have a family member with a cognitive deficit (or have one themselves), and educators. While not a self-help book, it may well stimulate further exploration and lead a person to new resources.
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