In the award-winning book The Mind Electric, Pria Anand, a neurologist described by the Times Literary Supplement as “Oliver Sacks’ most obvious heir,” reckons with the stories we tell about our brains–and the stories our brains tell us.
About the Book
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—all that the medical establishment has overlooked: 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.
Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, Anand demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.
About the Speakers
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, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Shaili Jain, MD, is a psychiatrist, PTSD specialist, and Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. A Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, her work focuses on the science and lived experience of trauma, and on expanding compassionate, evidence-based care for those affected by it. Drawing on over two decades of clinical work with trauma survivors, Dr. Jain brings a rare blend of scientific insight and deeply human storytelling to her writing and speaking. She is the author of The Unspeakable Mind: Stories of Trauma and Healing from the Frontlines of PTSD Science, a powerful exploration of how trauma shapes the brain, body, and spirit, and how healing becomes possible. Her work illuminates the complexity of trauma while offering hope, understanding, and a path toward recovery.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her recent work has been on voices, visions, felt presence, and other remarkable events in psychiatric illness and in religious experience. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. She has published over thirty op eds in The New York Times and in many other literary outlets such as Harper’s. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness (co-edited with Jocelyn Marrow), and How God Becomes Real. In 2027 she will publish Voices.
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