Disease often entails a deficiency in life, yet many of these deficiencies are not inevitable. Most of the patients I follow seem to live not just in spite of their conditions, but perhaps because of them, and even more due to the advantages such conditions present. Here are seven tales of nature and the human spirit, meeting in unexpected ways. The stories involve individuals with various neurological conditions like Tourette syndrome, autism, amnesia, and total color blindness. They embody these conditions, are "cases" in the traditional medical sense, but are also extraordinary individuals, each creating his own world. These are stories of resilience, survival demanding transformation, sometimes radical transformation, enabled by remarkable yet sometimes perilous powers of reconstruction and adaptation. In earlier books, I wrote about "preservation" of the self and, to a lesser extent, about "loss" of self in neurological disorders. I came to realize these terms are overly simplistic. In some instances, there is neither loss nor preservation of identity, but instead adaptation, even a complete transformation, resulting in a profound change in brain and "reality." Studying illness requires a doctor to explore identity or inner worlds patients form due to the illness’s stimulation. However, these patients' realities or how they and their brains construct their own worlds cannot be fully understood by merely observing behaviors externally. Besides the objective methodology of science, the natural world, we must also employ a shared subjective methodology, jumping as Foucault wrote "into the patient's consciousness to try to see the pathological world through the patient's own eyes.