A profile he once wrote of the novelist Saul Bellow won the President’s Medal for the best single article published in Canada in the year 2000.He is persuasive and curious as a writer, and rigorous as a thinker, though what he writes about is at the edge of our current understanding of mind and body. He started out as an award-winning poet and a student of philosophy. Doidge, a Canadian, is a distinguished scientist, a medical doctor, a psychiatrist on the faculty of both the University of Toronto and of Columbia University in New York. Norman Doidge’s two books, The Brain That Changes Itself(more than a million copies sold) and, just published, The Brain’s Way of Healing (which comes complete with that “mind-bending” quote, from the New York Times), present such dilemmas within their own covers. W hen you pick up a bestseller that announces “this book will change your life”, or which, say, claims to be full of “mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff”, what are your first instincts? Do you think “wow!” or “whoa”? In a bookshop, faced with a choice of browsing, do you turn most often toward shelves marked definitively “science” or those labelled provocatively “mind, body, spirit”?
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