Changeable Brain: What Cases of Traumatic Brain Injury Teach Us About The Mind

Brain injuries can result in highly specific and surprising changes in behavior that have revealed to us how the mind works.

The brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. After spending millennia trying to understand our ever-changing world, the brain is now turning its capacities for reasoning, remembering, and understanding inward, as it tries to understand itself.

The biggest breakthroughs in neuroscience have come mostly by accident. These accidents didn't happen in research labs. They happened on railway job sites, in showers, on bicycles, in cars or were the result of infections from uncommon diseases.

When an individual suffers brain damage as the result of an accident or illness, the negative effects can be profound—life altering and lifelong—yet the insights offered by the effects of these injuries have been revolutionary for neuroscientists. Through an examination of landmark cases of traumatic brain injury, Dr. Lorin J. Elias explains how each case has expanded our understanding of the mind.