Through twelve staggeringly compelling and beautifully crafted linked case studies, neurologist Pria Anand explores the myriad ways our brains both hide and reveal the world and ourselves from us. Taking inspiration from the legendary work of Oliver Sacks, Dr. Anand introduces us to some of her patients, exploring the fascinating continuum of neurological disorder she's treated and researched, from a fatal insomnia that curses a family over generations to an attack of encephalitis that convinces an overachieving perfect student that she's channeling the voice of the Holy Spirit. With a timely intervention on the existing canon of writing about the brain, Dr. Anand centres the experiences of women with neurologic illnesses, which are so often marginalized, and invites us to consider the vulnerability, complexity and power of our body's most mysterious organ.
Interwoven with these gripping stories, Dr. Anand chronicles her own experiences of stress, physicality, and exhaustion that pushed her brain to its limits throughout her journey from resident to doctor, as she navigated pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood along the way. This personal anchoring invites us to consider that, as Dr. Anand eloquently puts it, "there is a continuity between brains in extremis and the peculiarities of human brains even in the absence of disease, that neurologic symptoms are metonymic for the human experience in a way that extends far beyond the confines of particular rare diseases, and that the experience of neurologic disease-the mythologies it inspires, the fallacies it impels-is universal."
A young woman channelling the voice of the Holy Spirit. A mother whose children have been replaced by changelings.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 the strangest symptoms experienced by any single individual can show us something universal about being human.
