Broken Brains

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, but they resulted in infections from uncommon diseases or happened on railway jobs sites, in showers, on bicycles, or in cars and buses.When an individual suffers brain damage as the result of an accident, the negative effects can be profound, life-altering, and life-long, but 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.