My Plastic Brain: One Woman’s Yearlong Journey to Discover If Science Can Improve Her Mind

We’d all like to learn how to tweak the brain to avoid memory loss or to streamline the learning process with less anguish than it usually entails. Science journalist Caroline Williams invested a year’s time talking to brain researchers nationally and across the globe in an effort to learn if there were any available approaches that could be used to improve what she determined to be deficits in her own intellectual and emotional make-up. In essence, she sought to discover if the concept of neuroplasticity, or the ability of nerve cells to reorganize connections, could be manipulated to revise her own brain’s integrated circuitry. As a writer, she sought to find fixes to resolve stressful anxiety, memory lapses, and procrastination, and to find ways to increase cognition using herself as the guinea pig in the labs of a myriad number of researchers and psychologists. The reader is familiarized with the testing apparatuses and the organic investigations seeking to learn how the mind operates and how different parts of the complex brain react to various stimuli. This lengthy probe into current neurology research discloses the complexity of this endeavor while exposing the character and personality of the writer.

While examining the more recent techniques employed by neuroscientists, the details become somewhat overwhelming, making it difficult for the average reader to assess the value of these complex procedures, the descriptions of which can become overwhelming. The testing experiences, though amusing for the author, can become tedious for the reader.