American Scientist

THE MIND ELECTRIC: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. Pria Anand. 288 pp. Washington Square Press, 2025. $28.99.

The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains by Pria Anand is a book of stories: stories about the function and dysfunction of the human brain; stories about patients with neurological disorders; stories about the current and historical cultural contexts in which these disorders have been described and explained; and stories about Anand herself, as she trained as a neurologist and became a mother. In her own story, she shows the reader how she became the doctor she is today, by rejecting some of the training she received and learning to listen to the stories her patients tell.

Anand begins the book with the story of her grandfather: showcasing his personality, describing his adventures in Los Angeles and how he met his wife, and finally, about his physical decline due to motor dysfunction near the end of his life. Weaving together his story with an introduction to neurological organization and function, Anand sets the reader up for what to expect from the rest of the book: stories of patients—both her own and those from historical records—and the disorders they experienced. These stories help the reader understand the complex workings of the human brain and show how doctors are able to identify the brain’s dysfunction through their patients’ stories.

Each chapter is centered around a particular behavior or experience that is essential to our everyday functioning, such as sleep, pain, motor control, the vestibular senses, and language. Within each chapter, Anand describes these behaviors or experiences with examples of both typical development and function and the different forms of dysfunction seen in patients. She shares stories of how each disorder has been studied, named, and explored, often including the cultural context in which the disorder has been examined. She pairs these stories with seminal research studies for each topic. For example, to illustrate how our brains are primed for language, Anand writes, “In one study, a group of pregnant women read a children’s story aloud—a passage from The Cat in the Hat, for instance—twice each day, in a quiet place where their voice was the only sound. In the hours and days after birth . . . the newborns overwhelmingly chose to hear the story they knew over the unfamiliar one.” The brain works in amazing ways, even before birth.

Woven between patient stories are Anand’s critiques of the medical establishment’s treatment of patients, from the language used in medical notes to the showmanship in which doctors have engaged.

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In some instances, the tales are mysteries, with Anand revealing clues leading to the discovery of the cause of the disorders she describes. In other cases, the anecdotes are medical dramas about patients Anand has treated. But she takes care never to objectify the patients, unlike how Jean-Martin Charcot, a French doctor in the 1800s who specialized in “hysteria” in women, entertained Parisians with his “museum of curiosities,” exploiting the pain of these individuals. Anand’s compassion for her patients and their pain is clear throughout the book, even—and perhaps especially—in cases where a patient’s behavior was unusual or unexplained.

Anand also delves into lay explanations of the disorders she explores through a variety of cultural lenses. From India, to Guinea in sub-Saharan Africa, to a tiny island off the coast of Colombia, the reader is given a firsthand account of each of these communities based on her work and studies. About her time in Guinea, she writes: “From patients and their families at Hôpital Ignace Deen, though, I learned about other ways to make sense of epilepsy. I learned that epilepsy can be caused by the devil or by djina, invisible spirits who inhabit the sea and the forest . . . I learned that epilepsy comes at night, in black shadows and dark birds and bad dreams.” In relating these stories and beliefs about the neurological disorders she treats, Anand draws a parallel between the explanations doctors propose for the symptoms they see in their patients and the explanations laypeople give to these symptoms. Although only one is based in science, both types of stories are based on the knowledge one has and the attention given to the patients themselves.

Woven between patient stories are Anand’s critiques of the medical establishment’s treatment of patients, from the language used in medical notes to the showmanship in which some doctors have engaged. These critiques are part of her own story of how she became the doctor she is today. While writing about the numbing of emotion and the sleep deprivation she experienced during medical school, she also points out that “in some ways, the power imbalance inherent in medical practice derives from the ways in which doctors control their patients’ narratives. We arbitrate which stories are important and which don’t matter, which are true and which are false, as if we were omniscient rather than subjective beings, as if our training somehow excises the humanity, the personal, from our practice.”

By the end of the book, Anand reveals herself as a skilled yet empathetic neurologist who is also a gifted storyteller. Early in the book she writes that she wants to “both honor and contend with these stories within stories—the ones we tell about our minds, and the ones our minds tell us—in all their wonder, strangeness, and heartbreak.” Her book does exactly that.