The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind

My Tale of Madness and Recovery

By: Barbara K. Lipska, Elaine McArdle

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.