'Oliver Sacks-meets-When Breath Becomes Air ... Barbara Lipska's remarkable story illuminates the many mysteries of our fragile yet resilient brains.' Lisa Genova, bestselling author of Still Alice and Every Note Played When renowned neuroscientist Barbara Lipska's melanoma spread to her brain it started to play tricks on her. The expert on mental illness - an expert in how the brain operates - experienced what it is like to go mad. All we think, feel and dream, how we move, if we move, everything that makes us who we are, comes from the brain. So what happens when we lose our mind? Analyzing the science of the mind and the biology of the brain alongisde Dr Lipska's own extraordinary story, this is a powerful account of what happens when the brain fails. 'Completely compelling and powerful, and hard to put down.' Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, prize-winning author of Inventing Ourselves- The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain

Author Biography

Dr Barbara K. Lipska is Director of the Human Brain Collection Core at America's National Institute of Mental Health. She is an internationally recognized leader in human postmortem research and animal modeling of schizophrenia. Her primary research interests are in mental illness and human brain development. She conducts gene expression and epigenetic studies in postmortem human brains to investigate mechanisms of brain maturation, the effects of genetic variation on transcription and DNA methylation, and molecular mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. Her job involves the supervision of the collection of more than one thousand human brains, and she coordinates the donation process and distribution of well-characterized brain specimens. Information from these specimens is vital in improving our understanding of the causes of neuropsychiatric disorders and developing new treatments for these disorders. A marathon runner and a triathlete, she is a mother of two children, both doctors. She lives in Virginia with her husband Mirek Gorski.