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Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain (P.S.)
by Dennis Cass
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Harper Perennial (2008-03-01)
ISBN: 006059473X
EAN: 9780060594732
Dewy Decimal #: 500
Paperback: 240 pages
Release Date: 2008-03-11
SKU: 08080172
Condition: Like New As issued n
Comments: Paperback. Like new condition with no markings and no creases to spine or cover. Very slight wear to cover. Near fine copy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
When journalist Dennis Cass was nineteen years old his stepfather, Bill, suffered from a psychotic break. Cass tried to commit him to a mental institution only to watch Bill escape from a cab en route to a Harlem hospital and run raving down the streets of Manhattan. Some fifteen years later, a bout of writer's block turned Cass's thoughts toward the brain. A complete stranger to science, Cass immersed himself in the world of neuroscience, subjecting himself to brain scans, psychological tests, and scientific conferences, as he attempted to gain a better understanding of ADHD, anxiety, stress, motivation and reward, and consciousness. Then things got a little weird. What began as a more clinical effort to understand himself soon became a personal and emotional journey into the fragile, mysterious workings of the mind and the self. Head Case is a charming, hilarious, and at times harrowing memoir of scientific experimentation. It's a story of science and society, of fathers and sons, and of how the past lives on in the present. Along the way the book asks timeless questions: What do we know about ourselves? What can we know about ourselves? And how much self-knowledge can a single person handle?
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Customer Reviews
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Meandering Through the Mind
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-07-06
This book is a very loosely organized mix of intimate biographical detail and presumed reports from the field of brain function research. Unfortunately, the resultant pottage is rather seriously undercooked, so the reader just gets lumps of ingredients that fail to flavor or inform each other.
Cass talks a lot about his stepfather's eccentricities, drug problems, and probable bouts of manic-depression. The imbalance all this parental dysfunction brought to Cass' youth served as one of the primary spurs for Cass' adult investigation into the workings of the mind/brain and for this book. However, Cass just doesn't do a good enough job relating the two. After describing a particularly egregious lapse on the part of his stepfather, Cass proceeds to speculate somewhere down the line about whether such social insensitivity might have been caused by a defect in his Dad's amygdala. That's a pretty big bounce on the trampoline.
The reader is sent into further unfueled take-offs by Cass' own experiments in mental states. For example, he tries to test his tolerance for stress by keeping his arm immersed in ice water. Then he brings a picture of TV commentator Bill Maher to one of his interviews with a brain researcher to try to find out why Maher's face so frightens and frustrates him. Much of this book is just such childish brain chatter.
I did keep reading, mostly out of a sort of voyeuristic interest in what Cass' stepfather would do next. However, I really didn't learn much about the brain here, outside of the one more precise chapter that describes how the amygdala can register and "wire" fear even when we are not conscious of having been frightened. This chapter provides a possible explanation for the waves of panic experienced by people with anxiety disorders.
In general though, you would probably learn more about recent discoveries in brain function and chemistry in any issue of "Discover" magazine or "Scientific American," than you will find on these disjointed and rambling pages.
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Yawn.
Rating  (2)
Date: 2007-11-20
0 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Really wanted to love this book. What a great concept. But put it aside about 1/3 of the way through. Just not very interesting.
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Your mind is a terrible thing to taste...
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-07-23
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Head Case is an enjoyable journey of self discovery that many of us must travel. However, most of us don't do it with the vigor that Cass conjures up as he experiments on his own brain in his home-grown "laboratory" and offers it up to real scientists all over the country.
Whether conducting self-experiments in the kitchen while his family sleeps, or treating his real or possibly imagined ADHD with prescription meds, Cass ultimately learns more about himself, his childhood and his new role as a father than he sets out to.
It's nice to leave your brain behind and get inside someone else's for a short time. Head Case does just that. It's the neuroscience book for the rest of us. Buy it now, your brain will thank you.
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Unique and enjoyable
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-05-21
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
"Head Case" is very unique...sort of a combination of a memoir and a book about neuroscience (or at least the quest to understand neuroscience). Mr. Cass has a wonderful sense of humor...I laughed out loud on several occasions...it was a much funnier book than I thought it would be. In particular, I found his musings about Bill Maher very sharp and comical...I've had the same thoughts and feelings about Mr. Maher myself. I also really liked his depiction of his mentally ill stepfather and the time they spent as a family living in New York. I thought it was very apt portrayal of living with someone who has major psychiatric problems. While the book is a little bit scattered, I think that that actually adds to it's charm...it's not a predictable read. Anyone who has any interest in the brain or mental illness or who appreciates quirky, intelligent humor will like this book.
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Genre, Schmenre
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-05-16
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
[Full disclosure preamble: I used to work as a magazine editor, and Dennis Cass wrote for me. Some of what he wrote won awards. He's a pro. And a good guy to boot.] What's great about this book is that it messes with your expectations. You start out thinking it's a science book, and then you find yourself in memoir territory. But not icky, treacly, nobody-knows-the-trouble-I've-seen memoir; this one has a deep undercurrent of humor, despite the fact that some pretty unpleasant things go on. The science book doesn't go away--it gets augmented with the memoir. And then another section of the orchestra fires up, and it becomes a great book about writing, too. In an age when books are so often group-concocted like junior-high science projects and "branded" like candy bars or khaki pants, Head Case is a throwback to a time when you read a book because you wanted to connect with another mind.
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