“I did not want anyone to ever feel as disorientated and bewildered as I did.” Unlocking my Brain: Through the labyrinth of Acquired Brain Injury brings to life Christine’s personal experience of brain injury - from losing her vision and being unable to walk, talk or write, Christine regained her life, her thoughts and her career. In 1991 Christine was involved in a horrific car accident and suffered extensive injuries including Acquired Brain Injury (ABI). Unlocking my Brain shows the incredible plasticity of the human brain as well as the plasticity of the human spirit. An educator by training, Christine Durham taught at Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School for over twenty years and was a founding member of VAPS, an education program aimed to enrich the thinking and understanding of students. Determined to return to teaching, Christine developed and conducted over 4 000 Philosophy and Thinking workshops with her students and started her career as one of Australia’s most inspirational writers. At aged 67, despite her double vision, Christine obtained a PhD in Health Sciences and discovered even more effective ways to help people with brain injury help themselves.

This book offers an empowering approach to working with people with an acquired brain injury (ABI) based upon the views and perspectives of people with ABI themselves. Drawing upon Christine Durham's own ABI experience and Paul Ramcharan’s engagement in disability research over a quarter of a century, this volume gives voice to 36 participants with ABI, as well as carers and other professionals from both urban and rural areas. This unique perspective provides a long-needed, empathic alternative to the deficit-based model of ABI that dominates medical literature and existing rehabilitation models. In Insight into Acquired Brain Injury, the authors use educational and learning principles together with Durham’s extensive archive of experiential data to offer a reframing of the nature and experience of ABI and relevant a set of practical, real-world tools for practitioners. These ready-to-adopt-and-adapt scripts, guided interviews, research checklists, thinking tools and other innovative techniques are designed to engage with people and colleagues about brain injury as a means of supporting them to feel and fare better. With compassion and first-hand awareness, Insight into Acquired Brain Injury provides a much-needed perspective that deepens current understanding and translates the complicated life-worlds of people living with ABI in order to motivate, empower and increase their participation.

Whether you are recovering from a traumatic brain injury or supporting someone with a TBI, this collection of 101 inspiring and encouraging stories by others like you will uplift and encourage you on your healing journey. With a traumatic brain injury (TBI) occurring every 18.5 seconds in this country - concussions the most common - chances are you have been touched in some way by this experience. TBIs occur due to accidents and sports, and are also common in returning soldiers. The personal stories in this book, by TBI survivors and those who love and support them, will help and encourage you and your family on your road to recovery.

This exciting one-of-a-kind volume brings together new contributions by geographically diverse authors who range from early career researchers to well-established scholars in the field. It unprecedentedly showcases a wide variety of the latest research at the intersection of Australian literary studies and cognitive literary studies in a single volume. It takes Australian fiction on the leading edge by paving the way for a new direction in Australian literary criticism.

The relationship of consciousness to brain, which Schopenhauer grandly referred to as the "world knot," remains an unsolved problem within both philosophy and science. The central focus in what follows is the relevance of science---from psychoanalysis to neurophysiology and quantum physics-to the mind-brain puzzle. Many would argue that we have advanced little since the age of the Greek philosophers, and that the extraordinary accumulation of neuroscientific knowledge in this century has helped not at all. Increas ingly, philosophers and scientists have tended to go their separate ways in considering the issues, since they tend to differ in the questions that they ask, the data and ideas which are provided for consideration, their methods for answering these questions, and criteria for judging the acceptability of an answer. But it is our conviction that philosophers and scientists can usefully interchange, at least to the extent that they provide co~straints upon each other's preferred strategies, and it may prove possible for more substantive progress to be made. Philosophers have said some rather naive things by ignoring the extraordinary advances in the neurosciences in the twentieth century. The skull is not filled with green cheese! On the other hand, the arrogance of many scientists toward philosophy and their faith in the scientific method is equally naive. Scientists clearly have much to learn from philosophy as an intellectual discipline.