Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain [Hardcover]

Dennis Cass (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2007

Infiltrating the world of neuroscience, Dennis Cass offers up his own brain to "research," subjecting his mind and body to electric shocks, mind-numbing attention experiments, cigarettes, stress tests of his own devising, and the comedy of Bill Maher. Like a slightly off-kilter George Plimpton, Cass, in his daring exploits, reveals the intricacies of fear, attention, stress, reward, and consciousness from the inside out. Along the way, he weaves in the story of his stepfather's manic depression and drug addiction, in addition to his own problems--which are many. Cass attacks the subject of the human brain with wit and candor, turning popular science into something distinctly human. Head Case is an imperative read for anyone who has ever wondered, "Why am I who I am?"

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When writer's block threatened to interfere with Cass's career as a freelance journalist, he decided the solution would be to learn everything he could about how the brain works. He soon fancies himself an amateur scientist, embarking on a spree of experimentation, self-diagnosing himself with attention deficit disorder and scoring a prescription to Adderall, which helps at first but then starts messing up his mind. As Cass makes clear from the outset, the journalistic enterprise is fraught with emotional turbulence because it forces him to confront his family history, especially his stepfather's manic depression. Yet for all the outward appearances of candor—Cass, a former columnist for GQ and Slate, speaks freely of humiliating childhood experiences as well as of his adult jealousy of more successful writers like Malcolm Gladwell—it still feels like he's holding back. The science elements of the book are also insufficiently developed, especially when writers like Steven Johnson and Daniel Pink have already effectively staked out the genre of first-person guided tours of neuroscience. At times, Cass comes off as genuinely uncomfortable with what his research tells him about his brain and himself, leaving readers wishing he'd pushed harder to get a richer story. (Mar.)
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About the Author

Dennis Cass has been a journalist for ten years, writing for Harper's, Spin, Mother Jones, and Slate.com. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and son.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (February 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060594721
• ISBN-13: 978-0060594725
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,340,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Genre, Schmenre, May 16, 2007

By 

Jeffrey A. Johnson (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain (Hardcover)

[Full disclosure preamble: I used to work as a magazine editor, and Dennis Cass wrote for me. Some of what he wrote won awards. He's a pro. And a good guy to boot.] What's great about this book is that it messes with your expectations. You start out thinking it's a science book, and then you find yourself in memoir territory. But not icky, treacly, nobody-knows-the-trouble-I've-seen memoir; this one has a deep undercurrent of humor, despite the fact that some pretty unpleasant things go on. The science book doesn't go away--it gets augmented with the memoir. And then another section of the orchestra fires up, and it becomes a great book about writing, too. In an age when books are so often group-concocted like junior-high science projects and "branded" like candy bars or khaki pants, Head Case is a throwback to a time when you read a book because you wanted to connect with another mind.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Laughed Reading About His Losing His Mind, March 3, 2007

By 

Max Rottersman (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain (Hardcover)

When Cass says science isn't his thing, he's not speaking from false modesty. Fortunately, he keeps the science talk to a minimum (or leaves it to the likes of Malcom Gladwell). I give the book five stars because I enjoyed reading it despite a bad head cold. If you have anyone in your family with an addiction or mental illness this book will answer the question, "what would you find if you tried to understand that person through the latest in neuroscience?" Cass doesn't find any real answers, of course, but his journey is written with honesty and courage. That courage, to explore his fears, and expose the number of drinks and pills he has taken, makes him seem a mere mortal compared to Gladwell. But he should know it takes all kinds of authors to cover our collective head cases.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Meandering Through the Mind, July 6, 2008

By 

R. Schultz (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain (P.S.) (Paperback)

This book is a very loosely organized mix of intimate biographical detail and presumed reports from the field of brain function research. Unfortunately, the resultant pottage is rather seriously undercooked, so the reader just gets lumps of ingredients that fail to flavor or inform each other.

Cass talks a lot about his stepfather's eccentricities, drug problems, and probable bouts of manic-depression. The imbalance all this parental dysfunction brought to Cass' youth served as one of the primary spurs for Cass' adult investigation into the workings of the mind/brain and for this book. However, Cass just doesn't do a good enough job relating the two. After describing a particularly egregious lapse on the part of his stepfather, Cass proceeds to speculate somewhere down the line about whether such social insensitivity might have been caused by a defect in his Dad's amygdala. That's a pretty big bounce on the trampoline.

The reader is sent into further unfueled take-offs by Cass' own experiments in mental states. For example, he tries to test his tolerance for stress by keeping his arm immersed in ice water. Then he brings a picture of TV commentator Bill Maher to one of his interviews with a brain researcher to try to find out why Maher's face so frightens and frustrates him. Much of this book is just such childish brain chatter.

I did keep reading, mostly out of a sort of voyeuristic interest in what Cass' stepfather would do next. However, I really didn't learn much about the brain here, outside of the one more precise chapter that describes how the amygdala can register and "wire" fear even when we are not conscious of having been frightened. This chapter provides a possible explanation for the waves of panic experienced by people with anxiety disorders.

In general though, you would probably learn more about recent discoveries in brain function and chemistry in any issue of "Discover" magazine or "Scientific American," than you will find on these disjointed and rambling pages.