The Mind Electric

A young woman channelling the voice of the Holy Spirit. A mother whose children have all been replaced by changelings. A family cursed by a mysterious inability to sleep. Pria Anand''s patients come to her with myriad peculiar symptoms, but they all have something in common: their diagnosis always hinges on a story. Her task as a neurologist is akin to a detective''s, piecing together the clues in a patient''s account with the tells of their body in order to settle on a diagnosis. In her gorgeously lyrical, passionate and humane first book, Pria Anand shares stories of her own patients alongside her own experiences as a doctor, a mother and a patient, in order to explore all the bizarre ways in which our brains go awry. Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most strangest symptoms of a particular individual can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.

Auteur

Pria Anand is a neurologist at the Boston Medical Center and an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Texte du rabat

A thought-provoking journey through some of the strangest ways our brains can delude us and what these can teach us about medicine, narrative and being human