透過故事主角Jon Sarkin在歷經中風接受腦神經手術後，不僅改變他的性格，更指引他朝創造藝術之路而行。書中透過他的真實故事揭露當今的腦科學。

Joe Sarkin recovered from a massive stroke to discover that he had become a dramatically different person: one reborn as a compulsive, brilliant artist.

One day in 1988, when Joe Sarkin was playing golf, a tiny blood vessel deep inside his brain suddenly shifted, rubbing up against his acoustic nerve.

Joe Sarkin felt, as he recalls, that my brain just twisted.

Any noise now caused excruciating pain inside his head, and after months of suffering, he felt he wanted to die. Resorting to radical deep-brain surgery, he suffered a major stroke during recovery, and when he awoke, he was a new man, even though he retained almost complete memory of his prior self.

Once a calm, meticulous chiropractor, he was suddenly highly exuberant, volatile and possessed with a manic desire to create art.

Making art became his bridge to life, and Joe Sarkin is now an acclaimed artist who exhibits at some of the country’s most prestigious venues.

His wife and children have stood by him, and he has fashioned a new life, a new self, amid the shards of his past.

Amy Ellis Nutt interweaves Joe Sarkin’s story with lyrical and wonderfully accessible accounts of fascinating findings in brain science that illuminate the mysteries of what makes us who we are. At once wrenching and inspiring, this is a story of the remarkable human capacity to overcome the most daunting of obstacles.

Amy Ellis Nutt is one of the first science journalists in the country to develop a “brain” beat, targeting neuroscience, neurology and mental illness. She has two Masters degrees, one in philosophy from M.I.T, and another in journalism from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In 2004 she was selected to be a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University where she studied neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychology. At M.I.T. she studied with some of the foremost researchers in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, including Jerry Fodor, Ned Block and Noam Chomsky. The late Thomas Kuhn, the author of the seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was one of my advisors. She also taught the history of philosophy at Tufts University, where she was hired and mentored by Daniel Dennett, perhaps the foremost philosopher of consciousness in the country.

Nutt has won numerous national awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Pinnacle of Excellence Award (2004) and the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ first place award for Non-deadline Writing for a series of five science stories that have been published in The Best Newspaper Writing of 2003. She has been a writer at The Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark, New Jersey for 10 years. She lives in New Jersey.