Marc Lewis’s relationship with drugs began in a New England boarding school where, as a bullied and homesick fifteen-year-old, he made brief escapes from reality by way of cough medicine, alcohol, and marijuana. In Berkeley, California, in its hippie heyday, he found methamphetamine and LSD and heroin. He sniffed nitrous oxide in Malaysia and frequented Calcutta’s opium dens. Ultimately, though, his journey took him where it takes most addicts: into a life of addiction, desperation, deception, and crime.
But unlike most addicts, Lewis recovered and became a developmental psychologist and researcher in neuroscience. In Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, he applies his professional expertise to a study of his former self, using the story of his own journey through addiction to tell the universal story of addictions of every kind. He explains the neurological effects of a variety of powerful drugs, and shows how they speak to the brain?itself designed to seek rewards and soothe pain?in its own language. And he illuminates how craving overtakes the nervous system, sculpting a synaptic network dedicated to one goal?more?at the expense of everything else.
"Kirkus
"review in January 1 issue:
"Developmental neuroscientist Lewis examines his odyssey from minor stoner to helpless, full-blown addict....as [he] unspools one pungent drug episode after another, he capably knits into the narrative an accessible explanation of the neural activity that guided his behavior. From opium pipe to orbitofrontal cortex, a smoothly entertaining interplay between lived experience and the particulars of brain activity."
"Publishers Weekly"
"Meticulous, evocative... Lewis's unusual blend of scientific expertise, street cred, vivid subjectivity and searching introspection yields a compelling perspective on the perils and allure of addiction."
"Wall Street Journal
""Compelling...for readers grappling with addiction, Mr. Lewis's...approach might well be novel enough to inspire them to seek the happiness he now enjoys."
"Chronicle of Higher Education"
"He proceeds deftly from episodes of his drug years to neuroscientific explanations of his brain's response to drugs.""Boston Globe""A surprising and charming addition to this crowded genre. Yes, it embraces the classic redemption narrative - teenage experimentation, late-'60s Berkeley, exotic forays into Malaysia and Calcutta, the inevitable slide into deception, crime, and desperation. But he ends up a professional neuropsychologist, able to enliven the tired streams of addled consciousness with metrical rapids of semi-hard science." "Guardian""Marc Lewis's brilliant - if not wholly sympathetic - account of his many mind-bludgeoning drug experiences wears its biological determinism on its sleeve ... Lewis has certainly woven his experiences into an unusual and exciting book... ("Memoirs of an Addicted Brain") is as strange, immediate and artfully written as any Oliver Sacks case-study, with the added scintillation of having been composed by its subject."
"The Fix""the most original and illuminating addiction memoir since Thomas De Quincey's seminal" Confessions o --Kirkus
(W)hile the narrative of Marc s life is a real-page turner, what makes this such an interesting and unusual book is that it also contains detailed descriptions of the neuro-chemical changes that are going on inside Marc s brain as he takes the different drugs, and later as he wrestles to come off them. After reading the book, I felt that I understood for the first time what addiction is like at both the personal and the chemical level. --BBC Focus Magazine
