Best Books on Neuropsychology: Brain Damage, Recovery and Cognitive Mapping

Neuropsychology grew out of a grim observation: when specific parts of the brain are damaged, specific capacities disappear. A stroke to one region takes away the ability to recognize faces. Damage to another eliminates the capacity for new memory formation while leaving old memories intact. The field built its map of brain function largely from the study of what happens when things go wrong. The books below make that map accessible to non-specialists without sacrificing accuracy. ## The Lesion Method and What It Revealed The classical approach in neuropsychology was to identify patients with localized brain damage, document their deficits in detail, and infer from the deficit what function the damaged region normally performed. This method, pioneered by Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke in the nineteenth century, produced the first reliable maps of language in the brain and established the principle that mental functions are not uniformly distributed across the cortex. Oliver Sacks built a career out of making this tradition vivid. *The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat* (ISBN 978-0684853949) remains the most widely read book in clinical neuropsychology precisely because Sacks treated his patients as whole people rather than case studies, and because his clinical curiosity extended to what these unusual conditions revealed about the nature of identity, perception, and selfhood. The title case, a patient with visual agnosia who could no longer recognize faces or objects, is one of the most frequently cited in the literature, but the cases that follow are equally striking. ## Memory, Identity, and the Amnesic Patient The study of memory disorders produced some of neuropsychology's most important theoretical advances. The patient known as H.M., who underwent bilateral hippocampal removal in 1953 and could no longer form new explicit memories, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience. His case demonstrated that memory is not a single system and that different types of learning depend on different neural substrates. Suzanne Corkin, who studied H.M. for nearly fifty years, wrote *Permanent Present Tense* (ISBN 978-0465031597) as both a scientific account of what his case revealed and a humanizing portrait of the man himself, Henry Molaison, who died in 2008. Corkin is careful about the science and honest about the ethical complications of studying someone who could not remember consenting to be studied. The book is a genuine contribution to neuropsychology written in language that does not require a laboratory background to follow. ## Cognitive Mapping and the Spatial Brain The discovery of place cells by John O'Keefe in the 1970s, and of grid cells by May-Britt and Edvard Moser in the 2000s, transformed the understanding of how the brain represents space. The hippocampus, long known to be critical for memory, turned out to also contain a precise neural map of the physical environment, one that updates in real time as an animal moves through space. The connection between spatial navigation and memory is now understood to be deep: the hippocampus appears to use the same computational machinery for both, storing memories as patterns indexed by spatial and temporal context. This is why memory champions use the "method of loci," placing items to be remembered in imagined spatial locations, and why it works so reliably. ## Recovery and Neuroplasticity The old view was that adult brains were fixed: neurons lost to damage or aging could not be replaced and functions lost to injury were lost permanently. That view has been substantially revised. The adult brain retains considerable capacity for reorganization, and rehabilitation programs that exploit this plasticity have produced recoveries that would previously have seemed implausible. Norman Doidge's *The Brain That Changes Itself* (ISBN 978-0143113102) documents cases of dramatic recovery from stroke, developmental disorders, and other conditions that standard neurology had written off as permanent. Doidge is sometimes criticized for overstating the case for plasticity, and some of the claims in the book are contested in the scientific literature. But as an introduction to the concept and to the clinical possibilities it opens, the book is useful, and the individual cases are well documented. ## Further Reading [Explore more psychology and brain science books](/category/psychology) [Browse books on cognitive science](/category/science)