About Norman Doidge, M.D. (continued)

In 1994, Doidge won The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Saturday Night Literary Award, the most important award for an unpublished work in Canada.

His series of literary portraits of exceptional people at moments of transformation appeared in Saturday Night magazine and won four Canadian National Magazine Gold Awards, including the National Magazine Award President’s Medal, for the best article published in Canada in the year 2000. That account of his intimate conversation with the Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, called “Love, Friendship and the Art of Dying,” was “brilliantly sustained from beginning to end,” said the judges, who continued, “This multi-leveled piece about writing, friendship, life and death opens a door into the complex lives of two extraordinary literary figures.”

It was out of these kinds of portraits — and Doidge’s conviction that neuroplasticity represents the single most important new idea in our understanding of the human brain in hundreds of years, with immense consequences for our understanding of human nature, human and therapeutic possibilities, and human culture — that The Brain That Changes Itself emerged. The Brain That Changes Itself is being translated in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Norwegian.