The Mind Electric review: Pria Anand’s spellbinding debut book explores the marvels of our brains

The electric mind
Pria Anand (Virago (UK); Washington Square Press (United States))

From Home has Grey’s AnatomyThere is a good reason why the medical profession has inspired so many popular series. The journey of a patient through the hospital system can reflect narrative structures, with a start, a medium and an end, an action up and down and often a lot of tension.

As much as we could consider medicine as a hard science – blood, bones and pharmaceutical products – it is also a narration, writes the neurologist Pria Anand in her first lyric and often bewitching book, The electric mind: stories of the strangeness and the wonder of our brain.

When Anand was at the medical school in California, she feared that her predilection for the story of disadvantage. In fact, she discovered: “The ways that people choose to tell their story” can be as revealing as any result.

Anand is frank on his debt, in his writing and medical practice, to the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who has drawn his personal experience to diagnose his patients as well as to show empathy with their cases. The electric mind – she respectfully suggests – is in the best known work of sacks, The man who confused his wife with a hat.

No one could hope to equal the originality and the brilliance of Sacks, but Anand shares his humanity, his curiosity and her large -scale intellect. Its prose is as elegant and controlled during the fight against complex and often perverse functioning of the brain as when you tell the stories of special patients.

But The electric mind is more than a collection of “clinical tales”. Anand’s through line is the central importance of narration for the practice of medicine. The human desire for narration, she notes, is old, universal and so hard that it “often survives and even increases after the most devastating of the brain damage”.

The way a patient describes his state of health, whether good or bad, may not be supported by the evaluation of a doctor or his vital signs. Anand describes a patient, a retired pediatrician, which was made comatose after a cerebral hemorrhage. She seemed to be completely recovering, except for the fact that she came out of her hospital bed every morning to make her morning balls on her patient colleagues, confusing Anand and other doctors for her colleagues.

Anand is insightful about how our brain can mislead us and how they exist both as a frustration and a characteristic of medical care. But it is not only the delusions of patients who must be taken into account; The doctor is also relevant and can even be fallible.

Anand shows how changes in his own health affected her approach to her work – from the loss of sleep from medical training to “ghost noise” that she began to hear but neglected to investigate. (He was later revealed to be caused by a malformation in the veins connecting his brain to his heart.)

The “imbalance of power inherent in medical practice”, maintains Anand, does not only exist in the arrogance of a doctoral student, but in the binary false people he supports – between science and history, objective truths and subjective stories. Thanks to history, many diagnoses with confidence have been rooted in a “scientific” understanding which was simply wrong – consider the idea of ​​”wandering uterus”.

Although Anand and the first references of criticism to the bags are not moved, The electric mind Made me think more A glass bodyHistory and personal story of Caroline Crampton of the hypochondria. Where Crampton wrote from the point of view of a patient, Anand describes as a doctor of the same “large liminal expanse which extends between well-being and disease”.

The two books suggest an emerging general public opening to medical mysteries, not only to dramas, and perhaps recognition of the recognition that dichotomies that we have long accepted without question – between “healthy brains and failing”, for example, and even disease and health – are not always clear.

In The electric mindAnand demonstrates empathy, humility and deep interest in humanity which delimits an exceptional doctor – and which, in a perfect world, would be coherent throughout the profession.

She Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, in the United Kingdom,

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