The Mind Electric
A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
Named a Best Book of Summer by The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Publishers Weekly, and Book Riot
The Observer (London)’s Summer Reads Select
In this collection of medical tales “reminiscent of Oliver Sacks...the best of medical writing” (Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water), a neurologist reckons with the stories we tell about our brains, and the stories our brains tell us.
A girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient's story and the tells of their body.
Stories are etched into the very structure of our brains, coded so deeply that the impulse for storytelling survives and even surges after the most devastating injuries. But our brains are also porous—the stories they concoct shaped by cultural narratives about bodies and illness that permeate the minds of doctors and patients alike. In the history of medicine, some stories are heard, while others—the narratives of women, of Black and brown people, of displaced people, of disempowered people—are too often dismissed.
In The Mind Electric, neurologist Pria Anand reveals—through case study, history, fable, and memoir—all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story.
Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hallucinations, convulsions, delusions, and other symptoms shed light on the brain's obscure machinery, according to this luminous debut from neurologist Anand. Revisiting cases from her neurology practice as well as medical literature, novels, and even fables, she cites a woman who uttered prophecies in the voice of the Holy Spirit because of an autoimmune disorder that attacked her neurons; a mother with accelerating dementia who told Anand that her grown children were switched at birth with impostor babies; and a former doctor who fabricated stories about why she was at the hospital to paper over neural damage caused by a hemorrhage. At the heart of the book is an exploration of the intimate links between narrative and medicine—how the brain slots confusing impressions into stories to find "order in the chaos," but also how patients create narratives to understand their symptoms; how doctors selectively cull from that information to shape diagnoses; and how cultural narratives inform the ways patients and doctors view bodies, illness, and treatment. In the process, Anand elegantly transforms the clinical minutiae of neurological disorders into evocative poetry (of a woman suffering from involuntary spasms: "her fingers moved like those of a piano player... her tongue thrusting from her mouth like that of a hummingbird searching for nectar"). It's an engrossing exploration of the brain's extraordinary powers and terrifying frailties.
