This book is truly unique, written by a neurologist at New York hospitals and a British-born author, world-renowned for his numerous publications examining the cases and behaviors of individuals suffering from brain disorders or dysfunction. "Patients are the focus of my work and life," he says in this book, defining the context of his professional and humanitarian work, which requires him to live daily and constantly with the disease, which raises "fundamental" questions in him, and with his patients, who constantly draw him "to the question," which in turn constantly draws him to them. Thus, the reader will find "in the following stories and studies a constant movement from one direction to another." These are strange stories from a reality other than our ordinary one, and characters, each living in their own unique, private, and "real" world, stemming from the uniqueness of a mind we consider "disrupted" because its structure has become different from that of our ordinary mind. The author tells strange stories about people who "we might say are traveling to unimaginable lands"—lands of which we could otherwise have no idea or conception. Such as the lost sailor who has lost his sense of time, the prisoner who lives a certain, ever-recurring moment, the mentally retarded twin who has the extraordinary ability to perform mathematical calculations at an incredible speed, the old woman who monitors the movements of passers-by on the road and magnifies them to become frightening and terrifying, the man who thinks he is a dog, the musician who loses the ability to distinguish shapes, who mistook a hat for his wife's head, and other characters whose stories the author recounts in the book's four sections. The physician-author emphasizes the complex relationship between body, mind, and intellect, and asserts that the unification of their elements is what constitutes a human being. He thus raises the issue of the need for a new, more integrated medicine that does not treat the body in isolation from the mind and spirit. A must-read book, to gain rare knowledge and truths—but what truths! What stories! And what will we compare them to? We may not have any existing models, metaphors, or myths. Is it time, perhaps, for new symbols, new myths?