"A neurologist regales readers with extraordinary stories of the brain under siege. Our brains are the most complex machines known to humankind, but they have an Achilles heel: The very molecules that allow us to exist can also sabotage our minds. Here are true accounts of unruly molecules and the diseases that form in their wake, from total loss of inhibitions to florid psychosis to compulsive lying. Cognitive neurologist Sara Manning Peskin demystifies...

A compelling career memoir by an award-winning neuroscientist describes how while studying his own family's brain scans for research he made the disturbing discovery that his own reflected a pattern he recognized from those in the brains of serial killers, a finding that offered new insights into the role of biology in behavior.

"These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain's mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities--especially that of memory--were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history...

"In this book, Kandel recounts his remarkable career since receiving the Nobel in 2000... He takes readers through his lab's scientific advances, including research into how long-term memory is stored in the brain and age-related memory loss as well as the neuroscience of drug addiction and schizophrenia. Kandel relates how the Nobel gave him the opportunity to reach a far larger audience, which in turn allowed him to discover and pursue new directions....