Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath by Michael Paul Mason

Earlier this week I finished reading Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath by Michael Paul Mason (click here to read all my entries about this book).

I was surprised by Mason's references to Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism.

In the chapter titled Wood of the Suicides, Mason shares the tragic story of expressing his belief that suicide is okay with his friend John who subsequently hung himself.To cope with the suicide of his friend John, Mason visits a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York.

And on page 125 through 127, Mason summarizes the three death bardos described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and on page 213 introduces some of the Zen koans complied by the Chinese monk Mumon in The Gateless Gate.

Mason uses his discussion of Zen koans to illustrate the power of mindfulness training through guided meditations as a treatment for brain injury patients.

He even uses a haiku -- a kind of traditional Japanese poetry (俳句) -- in his Introduction (page 6):

In this world
We walk on the roof of hell
Gazing at the flowers. *

While I appreciate reading these Buddhist and Eastern ideas, I felt they were out of place in this book.

Also, while The Hospital in the Desert, the Chapter on Balad Hospital in Iraq, was interesting I felt that it too seemed out of place and perhaps could be the start of another book entirely.

I was also disappointed by the depressing and severe tone of this book and I much preferred the hopeful tone and the hard science of Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science.

Both books use stories of real life brain injury cases and while Head Cases uses them to paint a bleak picture of traumatic brain injury (TBI) without teaching readers much science, The Brain That Changes Itself inspires readers with the astonishing findings of neuroplasticity research.

As I recall, Mason dedicates just one page to neuroplasticity (page 169) and manages to make it sound unscientific.

My recommendation? Stick to Oliver Sacks and Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself. If you read Head Cases, be prepared for depressing hopeless stories; to be expected, I suppose, from a man who must feel constant frustration at the poor treatment available to patients with traumatic brain injuries.

* In case you're curious about the original Japanese text by Kobayashi Issa (小林一茶), I looked it up:

世の中は
地獄の上の
花見かな

And here's the romanization (also not included in the book):

Yo no naka wa
Jigoku no ue no
Hanami kana

Head Cases by Michael Paul Mason

As I sat at eating beef wide rice noodles (乾炒牛河, gān chaǒ niú hé in pīnyīn) at Chen's Kitchen (one of few Chinese restaurants in the Baltimore area that I've come across that serves this dish), I started reading Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath by Michael Paul Mason (click here to read my post about borrowing this book from the library).

Reading about young Cheyenne Emerick a struggling playwright in his 40s living in a dilapidated Hollywood apartment and suffering up to six seizures a day made me thankful for my generally injury-free life.

Cheyenne was just a young man when his love of snowboarding took him to Utah where he went of a jump at top speed, fell victim to flatlight (unable to see where the grey-white sky turned back into the ground) and landed in a quasi-cannonball position causing his knee to slam into his forehead and forever damaging his prefrontal cortex. Chapter One, The Hermit of Hollywood Boulevard, tells Cheyenne's story and Mason's inability to get him the help that he needs.

If it sounds intense, that's because these stories of traumatic brain injury (TBI) are often severe and permanently life-changing.

I will have to find some light reading after I finish Head Cases.

Click here to read an excerpt of this book.

Bonk by Mary Roach

I’ve found Mary Roach's website which has information on both Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and  Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

I enjoyed reading the excerpt of Bonk printed here.

As for Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath by Michael Paul Mason, Barnes and Noble has an excerpt of the introduction available here.

I'm very tempted to read these books before I read the others I have checked out from the library (even though those are due quite soon)!

More Library Books

I went to the library this morning to return a few books, and I could not resist borrowing a few (even though I already have seven checked out). Today I borrowed:

• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
• Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath by Michael Paul Mason
• 1776 by David McCullough (audio book)
• Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (audio book)

Now I've never listened to an audio book before, so this is really an experiment. I'm not sure if I'll actually get through 1776 or Dreams from My Father but I'll give it a shot.

I've read Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (which I found hilariously educational) and Head Cases sounds an awful lot like The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge or like Oliver Sacks's books (I’ve read Awakenings and An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales).

I read about Head Cases last month in the New York Times in William Grimes's review titled "Empathy for the Brain, After Insult and Injury" and in Mary Roach's review (yes the same Mary Roach) titled "Damage Control."

And I heard about Bonk last month in the New York Times in Janet Maslin's review titled "A Sex Researcher Walks Into a Lab, and Then Things Start to Get Comical" and in Pamela Paul's review titled "Sexual Advances."

Both are favorably reviewed and I hope they live up to my expectations.

Back to work!