Contemporary Authors

• Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains - 2018 John Murray, London, England

• Amazon -

  Helen Thomson is a writer and consultant with New Scientist. She has also written for the Guardian, Daily Mail, BBC Future and Psychologies and has won various awards for her journalism.
  Her research has taken her from coffee with five psychopathic mass murderers in Broadmoor to poking around in the Large Hadron Collider. She has exclusively revealed plans for the world's first head transplant, learned how to rule at roulette, had her fat zapped, scrubbed up for a cutting-edge prostate cancer operation and watched a paralysed man walk for the first time using a mind-controlled exoskeleton. But her greatest fascination remains writing about the brain, especially those that don't look like everyone else's.
  Helen has a BSc in Neuroscience and an MSc in Science Communication. She lives in London. This is her first book.

• Helen Thomson website - https://www.helenthomson.co.uk/copy-of-unthinkable

  HELLO
  Bio//
  ​
  I am a freelance science journalist and author. I work as a consultant at New Scientist, and write a blog about sex and gender for Forbes.com. My work has been published in New Scientist, Nature, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the BBC, the Washington Post, the Daily Mail and more. My book UNTHINKABLE - An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains is out now.
  ​
  For eight years I was an editor and reporter at New Scientist. During that time I had coffee with five psychopathic mass murderers in Broadmoor, interviewed a man who thought he was dead, revealed plans for the world's first head transplant, learned how to rule at roulette, scrubbed up for a cutting-edge prostate cancer operation, and watched a paralysed man walk for the first time using a mind-controlled exoskeleton.
  ​​

  ​
  In 2015, I won Best Staff Journalist at the Medical Journalist Association awards, for my articles on sequencing newborn babies, the experimental use of blood transfusions to combat dementia and a surgeon working towards a human head transplant. In 2014, I was shortlisted as Best Science and Technology Journalist in the British Journalism Awards. In 2010, I won Best Newcomer at the Association for British Science Writers Awards.
  ​
  I have a BSc in Neuroscience and a MSc in Science Communication. I particularly love writing about the brain, especially those that don't look like everyone else's. I am also interested in the human body, behaviour, medicine, fertility, society, microbiology, psychology, technology, wearables, food, textiles and the environment.
  ​
  This website contains a selection of my favourite stories.
  You can find a more extensive portfolio here. And feel free to contact me here.

Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World's Strangest Brains

Katharine Uhrich
Booklist. 114.17 (May 1, 2018): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World's Strangest Brains.
By Helen Thomson.
June 2018. 288p. Ecco, $27.99 (9780062391162); e book (9780062391186).616.
As Thomson gazed at a severed human head, her neuroscience professor remarked, "If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." The complexity and marvelousness of our gray matter still consumes Thomson, now a freelance journalist and science writer. With the notion that "strange" brains are the key to unlocking the secrets of our headspace and with a desire to know the people behind anonymous case studies, Thomson explores exceptional brains. Bob remembers every day of his life in stunning detail, likely due to a rare form of OCD. Matar thinks he can turn into a tiger, a unique manifestation of his schizophrenia. Graham lives a seemingly normal life, but for years he thought he was dead. With a scientists boundless curiosity and a writer's keen observation, Thomson imparts caring and humanity to each profile of these remarkable people. Unthinkable could easily sensationalize the weird and pervert the odd. Instead, Thomson underscores our commonalities and reminds readers that we all have truly extraordinary brains. Splendid for Mary Roach fans.--Katharine Uhrich
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Uhrich, Katharine. "Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World's Strangest Brains." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647335/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c543897. Accessed 29 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A539647335

Thomson, Helen: UNTHINKABLE

Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Thomson, Helen UNTHINKABLE Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 6, 26 ISBN: 978-0-06-239116-2
A user-friendly tour of the brain and the curious things that go on inside of it, from splendidly practical visions to debilitating hallucinations.
The brain is inseparable from the body, even if, writes New Scientist writer and consultant Thomson, "all too often we think about our brains as being somehow separate from ourselves." Of course, the concept of "ourselves" is not uniform: We see broad variations in the capabilities and workings of the brain, from normal to abnormal and all points between. Some of the most extraordinary brains aren't particularly interesting in the thoughts that they generate; one of Thomson's case studies possesses what is called "highly superior autobiographical memory," by which a person can recall just about every detail of every moment he has lived. There's a reason we forget, of course: It's an evolutionary adaptation that enhances survival so that we pay attention to the oncoming lion or truck rather than being constantly enthralled by lingering memories. "The brain doesn't tolerate inactivity," the late Oliver Sacks told Thomson in an interview. Indeed, the brain makes inventive use of its resources; thus it is that some people associate particular colors, musical notes, or even tastes with particular words, which is sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse. Thomson introduces a lot of good neuroscience lightly, explaining how we perceive reality, such as it is (one of her informants calls reality "a controlled hallucination, reined in by our senses"), and check in with ourselves ("our ability to sense the physical condition of our body is called interoception"). A bonus, along the way, are the author's notes on such things as improving memory skills through the construction of memory palaces and other event-fixing tricks and training the brain how not to get lost, a highly useful skill indeed.
Pleasing and accessible and of broader application than the title suggests, inasmuch as "we all have an extraordinary brain."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Thomson, Helen: UNTHINKABLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375117/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d5989ac. Accessed 29 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375117

Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

Publishers Weekly. 265.13 (Mar. 26, 2018): p106.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains
Helen Thomson. Ecco, $27.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-239116-2
Thomson, a writer for New Scientist magazine, spent two years interviewing people with unusual neurological disorders, and here shares nine of the most fascinating stories she heard. The interviewees include a woman from Denver who gets lost in her own house; a man from Bilbao, Spain, whose synesthesia gives him the impression of seeing other people's "auras"; and a London math teacher prone to musical hallucinations. Rather than focusing on the disorders, Thomson places the people at the forefront, exploring their varying responses to their conditions and intense struggles to live "normal" lives. Lay readers will value her ability to render scientific terms and theories accessible, and her corresponding skill as a storyteller. In one particularly memorable episode, the author travels to the United Arab Emirates to meet with a 40-year-old man suffering from lycanthropy, a rare syndrome involving delusions of transformation--in this case, into a tiger. She also visits a British woman who suffers from depersonalization--the feeling of becoming detached from oneself--and chats with a man who once believed himself to be dead. Throughout, Thomson emphasizes "we are our brains," convincingly showing that these strange minds belong to people from whom much can be learned, in a book that will please fans of the late Oliver Sacks. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2018, p. 106. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532997183/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=71bb1897. Accessed 29 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A532997183

Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains. By: Dalton, Beth, Library Journal, 03630277, 5/15/2018, Vol. 143, Issue 9
Section:
reviews: books
★Thomson, Helen. Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains. HarperCollins. Jun. 2018. 288p. notes. index. ISBN 9780062391162. $27.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062391186. SCI

Scientific revelations often occur when results do not fit within accepted paradigms. This is one reason neuroscientists research outliers; studying people with unusual brains has led to some of their greatest findings. Thomson, an award-winning science journalist, tells the story of nine people with extraordinary brains. But rather than focusing on the science, Thomson travels around the world to tell stories of the consequences of unusual cognition on lives. Her subjects include a man who believes he is a tiger, a man who for years believed he was dead, and a woman completely detached from both her internal and external worlds. The author often includes a tip about how the story, however strange it may seem, relates more generally to either humans or all mammals. While recognizing the challenges that each of the individuals face, this work is ultimately a celebration of variance within human experience. Indeed, the book may change your perception of what it means to be human. VERDICT Thomson has a gift for making the complex and strange understandable and relatable. Oliver Sacks is noted as an inspiration and, indeed, this book will appeal to his many fans.

Tricked by their minds By: James McConnachie, Sunday Times, The, Feb 18, 2018
Sunday Times, The, Feb 18, 2018, p36,37, 1p
Section: Features Edition: 01
Unthinkable An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains by Helen Thomson John Murray £20 pp290
You cannot write about oddball neurological conditions without standing in the long, deep shadow of Oliver Sacks and his The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Helen Thomson, a bright young science journalist, tries to step out of that shadow by discharging the subject from hospital. She wants to treat the owners of unusual brain conditions not as clinical studies, she says, but "as a friend might".
She identifies nine people with very weird brains, in short, and goes to talk to them.
Their conditions are certainly outlandish. Graham used to believe he was dead. Ruben sees coloured auras around everyone he meets, despite being colour-blind. Sharon exists in a state of being lost — so much so that when her children woke in the night when they were little, she had to find her way to their bedroom by following the sound of their crying.
Sharon hid her condition for 25 years, after her mother told her not to tell anyone "because they'll say you're a witch and burn you". She learned to navigate life by memorising routes by rote, instead of by recognising landmarks, which is how the rest of us mostly do it.
She also learnt to treat herself and in the most bizarre way. While playing pin the tail on the donkey, she discovered that spinning round could trigger a catastrophic loss of her sense of place, yet could also cure it. If she feels suddenly lost now, she finds a nearby bathroom, closes her eyes and spins around. "I call it my Wonder Woman impression," she tells Thomson.
Graham's condition of thinking he's dead, Cotard's syndrome, is extremely rare: only 100 cases of have ever been recorded. After suffering an electric shock he sat on a couch for months, just staring at the wall. What is especially odd is that he was unable to appreciate the rational inconsistency inherent in his condition: how could he believe he had no brain using a brain he believed was dead? He got better over time, although confesses to Thomson: "I'm sitting there sometimes and I'll suddenly feel a little bit dead."
Matar, though, is the winner in the weirdness stakes. He believes he is a tiger. Not in a metaphorical, thrusting-entrepreneur sort of way. When he looks in a mirror, "I see myself as a tiger and I see a lion that's catching hold of my head and my neck".
Matar's condition is known as clinical lycanthropy, after the Latin for werewolf, because among the very few patients that have ever had it, a handful have believed that they were wolves. He is the only person that Thomson visits in hospital, for reasons that become apparent.
The interview is going well until Thomson asks him why he is specifically a tiger, not some other cat. This seems to trigger a relapse. "I feel like you are eating my legs, like a Kentucky drumstick," he replies, disconcertingly. "You feel like a lion to me, I want to attack you before you attack me." A doctor suggests they are not safe in the room and the interview is cut short.
Joel's brain is peculiar in a distinctly nicer way. He feels what other people feel. This is not ordinary empathy. If Thomson bites her lip, he actually feels it. If she rests a hand in her lap, he feels it, too. When she smiles, hefeels happy. Joel works as a doctor, which has attendant problems. When he first saw a man die, he tells Thomson, he felt his own breathing slowing down alarmingly. "It's as if I'm dying as well," he says. "It's kind of like when you're in a room with an air-conditioning unit in the background and suddenly it just shuts off."
Empathy also helps him professionally, however. He can really feel their pain. He also perceives numbers and colours attached to people that allow him to read their personalities: he describes Thomson so accurately that she feels disconcerted. Some people find his insight "really violating", he admits — and Thomson herself becomes increasingly uncomfortable as the interview progresses. (This is perhaps why she never asks him the obvious question: for a hyperempathiser with "mirrortouch synaesthesia", what does sex feel like?) Thomsonconcludes that Joe's empathy "is not a characteristic unique to his brain, but an extreme example of an ability we all possess". This is true of almost all her case studies, and it amounts to the ultimate message of her book: individual brains can be very strange, but ultimately what all brains do is pretty strange.
Thomson is a smart writer, then, but not a profound one. "Everything that we feel, every story we experience or tell," she breezes, at one point, "we owe to that three-pound lump of mush in our heads." Well, yes.
She also follows the transatlantic science writer's textbook, which stipulates that when you meet anyone, you must describe where you met them, how you got there, what the weather's like and what colour jumper they're wearing. She visits Graham in a West Country caravan park, Sharon in "a quiet neighbourhood full of neat little condos" in Denver, Joel in the lobby of a luxury hotel in Boston — and none of it means a damn thing. Feeling jet lagged does not prove you're on a quest.
In fact, by divorcing these fascinating conditions from the clinical environment, Thomas does not bring them to life but loses the very thing that made Sacks so thrilling to read. He was on a personal and clinical mission to delve deeper, to explore, to understand; Thomson truffles out peculiarities. Sacks was a traveller, in other words; Thomson takes us on a package tour. c BAD BEHAVIOUR One uncomfortable case cited by Thomsonconcerns Luke, who in 2000 began showing an interest in child pornography. Arrested for child molestation, hewent to hospital after complaining of a headache, and a giant tumour was discovered in a brain region that affects "drive, motivation and judgment". With the tumour removed, "Luke's paedophilia disappeared". When his urges recurred a few years later, doctors found the tumour had regrown.

Times, The (United Kingdom), Feb 10, 2018, p14, 1p
Doctor, I think I'm a tiger By: Laura Freeman, Times, The (United Kingdom), Feb 10, 2018
Section: Features Edition: 01

Unthinkable An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains by Helen Thomson Sb J2 John Murray, 290pp; £20

'Idon't know why I'm a tiger," says Matar, a psychiatric outpatient, "I just know I am. I hear lots of voices around me, telling me I'm no good. They laugh at me. They tell me I'm rubbish, that I'm not good enough to be human."

In the consulting room with Helen Thomson, a British neuroscientist by training, a journalist by trade, Matar flexes his fingers as if they were claws. "You feel like a lion to me," Matar tells her. "I want to attack you before you attack me." Then, Matar starts to growl.

It is a tribute to Thomson's compassion and to her curiosity that she doesn't make a run for it. Matar, diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 16, once jumped out of his chair while having his hair cut and tried to bite the barber. Matar's schizophrenia takes a rare form known as clinical lycanthropy. Once, this described the delusion that one was a wolf in man's clothing (Greek: lykos — wolf; anthropos — man). Now lycanthropy has a broader definition as the belief that one has turned into any animal. Reports describe people who believe they are dogs, snakes, hyenas, even a bee. One woman, who thought she was a frog, arrived in a hospital emergency room croaking, hopping and darting her tongue to catch flies.

The mind does funny things, argues Thomson in Unthinkable. Odd things. Unnerving things. In this fluent, eye-opening book she explores what happens when the mind misbehaves: distance is distorted, memory plays tricks, people hear in colour and see in music. Thomsons's style is wonderfully clear. She never talks down to the layman. If there is academic jargon, she carefully explains it, drawing useful analogies. She is the science teacher you wish you'd had at school.

Describing the anatomy of the brain she talks of the cerebral cortex — the outside shell, divided into two almost identical hemispheres — as having a texture like "shiny panna cotta". The cerebellum — the smaller secondary mass at the back of the brain responsible for balance, movement and posture — is like a "shrivelled cauliflower".

What really gets the little grey cells going, though, are her case studies. Sharon is permanently lost: even between her own bedroom and bathroom. When her babies cried at night she had to follow the sound to their cots. As a little girl, she told her mother about this extreme disorientation. "Don't ever tell anybody about this," her mother said, "because they'll say you're a witch and burn you." This wasn't the Middle Ages, but 1952. It's a stark reminder that "medieval" attitudes to mental illness, or simply mental difference, have persisted until very recently — and still do in some places.

Sharon's condition was named "developmental topographical disorientation disorder". The cause was a mystery because tests showed that Sharon's brain was completely healthy: no epilepsy, no lesions. The only thing that seemed to help was spinning on the spot like a superhero changing into cape and tights — Sharon calls it her "Wonder Woman" impression — to "right" the brain and re-establish its location. But why? One of the most revealing sentences in this book is spoken by Sharon's doctor: "I can scan her brain, but I can't enter her mind."

The unruliness of the misfiring brain is what makes Unthinkable so fascinating and so frightening. The conclusion of specialists, doctors and experts is often a baffled: "We dunno." There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio… etc, etc.

In the chapter Switching Personalities we meet Tommy, born in Liverpool to a poor Irish family. He grew up hungry, desperate, thuggish. "Drugs, stealing, fighting. I did it all." Then, after a blood vessel burst in his brain, he woke up changed — he became a soppily tearful New Man. Stranger still, having never before been creative, he began painting obsessively, for up to 21 hours a day, covering every wall of his house with murals. Tommy also started to talk in rhyme. He tells Thomson: "My brain is like a hive of bees." Similar cases report patients waking up with a mania called hypergraphia, an unstoppable desire to write.

Elsewhere we meet Louise, who suffers from "depersonalisation" — a feeling that the world around her isn't real. She says every day is like Edvard Munch's painting The Scream. Graham believes he is dead. "Walking corpse syndrome" is the name given to this phenomenon. "It's really spooky," he says. Joel flinches when other people are slapped. Ruben suffers from a rare variant of sense-blending synesthesia, where a person may "taste lemon when they hear the sound of a bell, or see red when they think of a number". Ruben describes seeing people's personalities as halos of colours, as if they were "auras".

This book is full of nuggets. When you give an introvert an anaesthetic, they need more to send them to sleep than an extrovert would. Vladimir Nabokov was a synesthete who saw letters as colours and textures: "The long a of the English alphabet … has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony." There is such a thing as "orgasmcolour synesthesia": seeing kaleidoscopes of colour at the point of climax.

Thomson's book repays careful reading. Don't skip the science to get on to the well-I-never case histories. You need both together. And when the doctors Thomson interviews conclude, at the end of their examinations, that they simply cannot explain the weird workings of the brain, it isn't a "dunno" of defeat, but of wonder.

Uhrich, Katharine. "Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World's Strangest Brains." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647335/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c543897. Accessed 29 June 2018. "Thomson, Helen: UNTHINKABLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375117/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d5989ac. Accessed 29 June 2018. "Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2018, p. 106. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532997183/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=71bb1897. Accessed 29 June 2018.

• EveningStandard
  https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/extraordinary-journey-through-the-world-s-strangest-brains-by-helen-thomson-review-a3761726.html
  Word count: 625

  Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains by Helen Thomson - review
  Science writer Helen Thomson gives us a taste of just how different the world can look to others, says Dylan Evans
  Dylan Evans
  Thursday 8 February 2018 15:30
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  Does the world look the same to you as it does to me? We generally assume that it does, but occasionally something happens to undermine this comforting assumption. In 2015, for example, a photograph of a dress went viral after viewers began arguing over whether it was black and blue, or white and gold. If people can disagree about something as apparently obvious as the colour of a dress, perhaps our experiences differ in many other ways too.
  In Unthinkable, the science writer Helen Thomson gives us a taste of just how extreme these differences can get. She goes to meet nine extraordinary people whose perceptions and experiences appear at first like something out of Alice in Wonderland. There’s a woman who hears a nonstop series of musical notes and a man who sees auras. Another woman feels permanently lost.

  Stories like this have become a familiar feature of the popular science genre since 1985, when the British neurologist Oliver Sacks published The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Thomson makes more than a passing nod to her illustrious predecessor. Yet she also brings a refreshingly personal touch to her vignettes, recounting her conversations with each of her subjects in humane and often humorous prose.

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  Some of the people have seen the world in unusual ways since birth. Since they assume that everyone sees the world like them, when it does eventually dawn on them that they may be weird, they may try to hide their idiosyncrasies out of shame or guilt. When they do let others into their secrets, they are often met with disbelief. Others are aware of how unusual their perceptions are because they haven’t always seen the world that way.

  Read more
  What She Ate by Laura Shapiro - review
  “My brain is like bees in a hive,” Thomson hears from Tommy, who underwent a radical personality change after a blood vessel burst in his brain. “In the middle, all you see are honeycomb cells covered in cling film. When you stroke those little honeycomb cells, lots of other cells break out from it, like a lightning flash touching a brain cell. And from that cell comes a volcano, emitting Fairy Liquid bubbles with billions and billions of images.”
  These reports from the distant horizons of human experience prompt Thomson to wonder about the less dramatic differences that make each of one us unique. You may not see auras or feel as if you are turning into a tiger, but there are other ways in which your experiences differ from mine.

  Thomson’s book suggests that we should not be so quick to blame others when they make what seem like obvious mistakes. The partner who is always losing his keys may simply be careless, but it’s also possible he is living in a very different world.
  In one or way or another, perhaps we are all neurologically impaired.
  Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains,by Helen Thomson (John Murray, £20); Buy it now

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