Broken Brains: How Landmark Cases of Traumatic Brain Injuries Changed Our Understanding of the Mind

How brain injuries can result in highly specific, surprising, and revealing changes in behaviour that teach 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, or in cars and buses, or were the result of infections from uncommon diseases.

When an individual suffers brain damage as the result of an accident, 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. We have learned a tremendous amount about the brain from individuals with acquired brain injuries. These are some of their stories.

Lorin J. Elias is professor of psychology. He completed his Ph.D. in Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo, and has been studying the brain for over twenty-five years. His research has been featured in popular newspapers and magazines around the world. Lorin lives in Saskatoon.