David Adam discusses OCD and how neuroscience can enhance your intelligence.
David Adam
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop
and The Genius Within
Have you ever had a strange urge to jump from a tall building, or steer your car into oncoming traffic? You are not alone. In this captivating fusion of science, history and personal memoir, David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us towards obsessions and compulsions.
David has suffered from OCD for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece; or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal, and what is mental illness.
Told with fierce clarity, humour and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare, and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds.
“Clear-sighted and eminently accessible… a fundamentally important book that will bring a breath of fresh understanding to sufferers – as well as mental-health professionals, and family and friends of anyone who exhibits symptoms of OCD. I urge anyone to buy it. It will make you think again.” – The Sunday Times.
In The Genius Within, David Adam reveals how frontier neuroscience can enhance your intelligence – making you smarter, sharper and brighter than you ever thought you could be.
What if you have more intelligence than you realize? What if there is a genius inside you, just waiting to be released? And what if the route to better brain power is not hard work or thousands of hours of practice but to simply swallow a pill?
David Adam explores the ground-breaking neuroscience of cognitive enhancement that is changing the way the brain and the mind works – to make it better, sharper, more focused and, yes, more intelligent. Sharing his own experiments with revolutionary smart drugs and electrical brain stimulation, he delves into the sinister history of intelligence tests, meets savants and brain hackers and reveals how he boosted his own IQ to cheat his way into Mensa.
Going to the heart of how we consider, measure and judge mental ability, The Genius Within asks difficult questions about the science that could rank and define us, and inevitably shape our future.
“Witty, sharp and enlightening… This book will make you smarter” – Adam Rutherford, science writer and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science.
