The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

In this collection of medical tales “reminiscent of Oliver Sacks and the best of medical writing” (Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water), a neurologist reckons with the stories we tell about our brains, and the stories our brains tell us.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 me