Head Cases

There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. (See here for the Times review.) Mason brings a unique perspective to the tragic tales, as he's not a neurologist or a neuroscientist. Instead, he's a brain injury case manager based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so the stories are as much about the bureaucratic maze of insurance claims as they are about the hippocampus. The Times review criticizes Mason for "giving the neuroscience short shrift," but, for me, that was one of the strengths of the book. It's easy to forget that, behind every lesioned amygdala, or damaged orbitofrontal cortex, or withered basal ganglia, there exists a real human being, whose existence has been forever altered by some scarred tissue inside the skull. We shouldn't feel the need to reduce every illness into nothing but an anatomy lesson.

That said, the book is also filled with fascinatingly morbid facts, like this:

There's a good chance you already have a brain tumor. It's either in your head or in the head of someone you love, so it might as well be you. Every fifth person has a tumor somewhere in his or her skull, quietly embedded in a gland or elsewhere, too small to see and too scary to want to see. For most of us, this tumor will remain still and undetected, and we will pass our lives pleasantly unaware of its presence.