Neurology/brain science

Dean Burnett says the human brain is like a computer that files information in a way that defies logic. According to Burnett, brains can alter memory, cause motion sickness and affect intelligence.

Neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, talks about the use of TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation to treat patients with autisim spectrum disorder. One of his patients, John Elder Robison Robison participated in a six-month-long study, in which he received weekly TMS treatments. He details the treatments — and the emotional awakening that resulted — in a new memoir, Switched On.

In his memoir Do No Harm, Henry Marsh confesses to the uncertainties he's dealt with as a surgeon, revisits his triumphs and failures and reflects on the enigmas of the brain and consciousness.

In his latest book, neuroscientist David Linden explains the science of touch. He tells Fresh Air how pain protects, why fingertips are so sensitive and why you can't read Braille with your genitals.

New research shows that teenagers' brains aren't fully insulated, so the signals travel slowly when they need to make decisions. Neuroscientists Frances Jensen, who wrote The Teenage Brain, explains.

David Adam has had obsessive-compulsive disorder for 20 years. In The Man Who Couldn't Stop, he chronicles his experiences -- and how medical understanding and treatment of OCD have changed over time.

The famed neurologist talks to Fresh Air about how grief, trauma, brain injury, medications and neurological disorders can trigger hallucinations -- and about his personal experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s.

For nearly 50 years, neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin worked with Henry Molaison, who lost most of his memory in 1953 after experimental surgery for severe seizures. Their work together taught us much of what we know today about memory, and she writes about Mollison and their work in her new book.

"The view that drug use is a moral choice is pervasive, pernicious and wrong," writes David Sheff in Clean, a critical look at the nation's approach to drug treatment. Shelf argues that we should not wait for "rock bottom" -- that addiction should be treated promptly, just like any other disease.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman says everything we think, do and believe is determined by complex neural networks battling it out in our brains. His book Incognito, in which he explains what scientists are learning about this hidden world of cognition, is now out in paperback.

This interview was originally broadcast on May 31, 2011. David Eagleman's Incognito is now out in paperback.