The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains by Pria Anand | 2025 | Washington Square Press | Hardcover $ 28.99
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 — 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.
Disclosure statement: I received a print review copy of this title from the publisher via giveaway from Goodreads.
I have some lay-person-level interest in neuroscience due to some personal experiences (which shall remain unspecified), but I don’t really have much interest in diving deep into med school textbooks or scholarly journal articles about it; so, when a narrative nonfiction book on the subject popped up on my radar, I jumped at a chance to read it. I was hoping to find an interesting perspective on “the strangeness and wonder of our brains.”
The book’s specific focus is on the way our human tendency to build narratives is reflected in and influences the science-art of medicine. These narratives can be individual, intimate things, or they can be bigger cultural phenomena. People often construct stories to explain their sometimes otherwise inexplicable experiences. Patients tell stories to ask for help. Doctors tell stories to build a potential diagnosis. And in medicine, more extensive stories, sometimes built over hundreds of years of tradition (and politics, and religion, and so on), are drawn on to explain symptoms or inform treatment… even if that sometimes means overlooking actual evidence or disregarding rigorous scientific practice.
Your brain’s predilection for telling stories about itself can manifest as symptoms in the case of damage or disease, as when a person who has been blinded by cortical neuron damage is convinced that they are still able to see. At the same time, that ability to build a narrative is what allows the brain to make sense of itself, for doctors to investigate medical mysteries of the neurological system, such as when livestock veterinarians and human doctors together identified an elusive cause of disease that we now know as prions. It can also sometimes be a barrier to solving said mysteries, when the brain gets carried away with a convenient story that does not in fact offer a solution to the problem, as would be the case if a physician dismisses a patient’s reported pain as psychosomatic simply because the patient is a woman who has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
One of the most interesting story threads in the book, to me, was about Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. I remember learning a little about him in an undergrad microbiology class when we were studying the history of germ theory. Dr. Semmelweis was a physician at a hospital with a high mortality rate from childbed fever. Women who instead gave birth at the nearby maternity ward with only midwives instead of physicians or even on the actual street outside the hospital were noticeably less likely to die. The doctor was haunted by his patients who died and was determined to figure out the cause; he spent years investigating one possibility after another. Finally, he hit upon the hypothesis that it was the medical students themselves who were causing the problem — because they dissected cadavers in the morgue before making rounds to examine patients. When he insisted that his students begin washing their hands with a mild bleach solution (which we now know is antimicrobial), the incidents of childbed fever deaths dropped to nearly nothing.
Dr. Semmelweis was a kind of hero, but that isn’t where his story ends. We learned about him in that class because he was a pioneer in early germ theory. We also learned that his ideas, despite being backed up by clear evidence gathered with scientific rigor, were rejected. The reason his story is included in the book is because he was ignored by a medical community that was so committed to traditional narratives about disease that it couldn’t accept a new idea. Childbed fever was blamed on the poverty of the mothers, on the hysterical tendencies of women, on the uncleanliness of immigrants, even on a centuries-old notion of an imbalance of the four humors. The idea that doctors were just not washing their hands well enough was dismissed. What I don’t remember learning about in this class is the ultimate fate of Dr. Semmelweis. He was involuntarily committed to an insane asylum, where he was beaten so badly by guards that he was killed.
Anand’s prose is elegant, often an actual pleasure to read even when the subject is some dire case study with a painful outcome (which it usually is). The narrative threads of the book seem to leap around a bit, from historical medical breakthroughs to contemporary case studies to personal experiences of the author, though all are eventually woven together to complete a story within an overall theme for each chapter.
Overall, I think this could be a good choice for anyone who has an interest in health sciences and the history of medicine, as well as readers who have personally experienced complex neurological issues, or care about someone who has, and would like to learn a little more about how modern medical science perceives that kind of problem. The book will be released in just ten more days, so if it sounds appealing now is a good time to preorder it or request it from your library.
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Publication information: Anand, Pria. The mind electric: A neurologist on the strangeness and wonder of our brains. New York City, New York: Washington Square Press, 2025. Advanced copy.
Source: Provided by publisher, via Goodreads giveaway.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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