The Shattered Mind: The person after brain damage, by Gardner, Howard
Inventory #: 00908
Price: $10.00

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The Shattered Mind: The person after brain damage, by Gardner, Howard. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1975. Edition: First edition stated with no additional printings. ISBN: 039449315X. Hardcover, xiv,481,viii pages. White cloth with author's initials in gilt near center of cover and with title, author, and publisher in gilt on spine. Pictorial end papers show the structure of the brain, wit hthe left cerebral cortex in man on the left and a phrenologist's view of brain organization and function from Johann Kaspar Spurzheim, 1826 on the right. Includes Notes and an Index.

Condition: Very Good in a Fair jacket. Spine ends and corners are lightly bumped, and there is some very minor smudging to top page edges. Jacket has many closed tears and a large chip on the front where a price sticker was undoubtedly removed.

Contents: From the jacket

The immediate fascination of The Shattered Mind lies in Howard Gardner's lucid and convincing descriptions of the many forms of brain injury -- often supported by extraordinarily moving dialogues with actual patients. Here are people who can fully follow and understand complex conversations but can express themselves only in nouns; people who have lost the capacity to read words but remain perfectly able to read numbers and to write every kind of symbol; people who no longer recognize the faces of loved ones but are able to recognize their voices and draw their pictures; people who cannot commit to memory and a single new word but can learn entire new melodies with little effort. Any here are people whose intellectual functioning seems intact but who have lost any sense of "self" or "identity"; and others with different lesions, whose intellect has been vitiated but whose sense of self has been miraculously spared.

Moving beyond these very specific symptoms and case histories, the author addr4esses himself to a series of fundamental problems and questions: the variety of ways in which skills break down with age or brain injury; the relationship -- not always reversed -- between development and breakdown of capacities; the vexed issue of the differences between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, which has been deceptively oversimplified in recent accounts. . . . The detective-story fascination of particular syndromes and the scientific importance of neuropsychological investigations are abundantly clear. But what is finally most arresting about the fragmented world delineated here is the fresh illumination it casts on the functions of our own minds -- on our own normal capacities for reading, writing, and memory; on such special skills as mathematics and music, such momentary lapses as forgetting a friend's name, misreading a sign, confusing one's left with one's right, or misconstruing a new game; such large enigmas as the relationship between language and thought, or the existence of a unified consciousness.