27-05-2025
Mystified by the human brain? This doctor has spent years observing it
Doctors' accounts of their lives and work have historically tended towards the megalomaniacal. This is true not only of those dealing with matters of life and death both daily and viscerally (emergency doctors; surgeons), but also of those who are used to holding dominion over the brain. I've read more than a few medical memoirs that betray no uncertainty, reveal no insecurity, offer no hesitation or deviation from the wearying doxa that nothing bar rocket science could compare to the complexity and prestige of studying the brain.
The Mind Electric, Pria Anand's first book, is nothing like these. It brings together into one compelling volume autobiography, clinical anecdotes, family lore, medical history, medical mystery and an appropriate dose of politics – for Anand works at what is known in the American system as a 'safety-net hospital', and continually confronts the consequences of her country's paltry yet blisteringly expensive approach to public healthcare.
Because neurology continually moves between the brain and the mind, between the manifest and the unseen, and between what patients feel and doctors think, it's impossible, in general, to fully disentangle it from the practice and history of psychiatry, nor the violence which punctuates that murky past. Anand doesn't flinch in confronting this legacy or its continued grip on medical discourse. She describes, for instance, how the specific terminology that doctors use – the patient 'complains'; the patient 'denies' – imbues the clinical encounter with needless adversity.
Anand writes with circumspection and sensitivity, and with creativity and verve as well. Despite her abiding interest in narrative coherence, the book itself is delightfully labyrinthine; Anand refuses linearity, much less chronological order, and instead offers a strange and compelling tapestry of stories somehow both discrete and happening all at once, its threads overlapping and interweaving with layers hidden underneath.
She takes readers from ancient Egypt, through the Salpêtrière (France's brutal 17th-century women's hospice), and right into the consulting rooms of today. With no need for exaggeration or polemic, she brings into especially sharp relief how neurology has enacted the mistreatment of women's health for as long as men have been messing about with our nerves. In a particularly jarring example, she explains that not only do women suffer from multiple sclerosis three times as frequently as men, but they're still also frequently disbelieved, being dismissed as 'hysterical' by doctors repeatedly before finally being diagnosed.
Amid all this, Anand unabashedly braids in intimate and exposing personal details. She discloses private tragedies, moral injuries, mistakes; these are the pieces that make this memoir genuinely compelling. Several times, Anand calls her medical training 'alchemical', making clear that what might be mythologised as an impossible power really offers a Midas touch, its initiants being possessed of intimate knowledge of human life while being required to detach from, or even deny, their own humanity.
At one point, she describes being plagued for months by overwhelming aural symptoms – the persistent, resonant, throbbing sound of her own pulse, accompanied by debilitating disorientation – while being equally stubbornly attached to an imaginary bright line between sick people and doctors. She writes of her 'refusal to acknowledge my physical frailty welling from some primal desire to separate myself from my patients, to imagine that I was in some elemental way apart from the suffering that surrounded me [and] somehow inoculated against it'.
Such insights not only show the thoughtfulness with which Anand reflects upon her profession: they also underscore the project of The Mind Electric, which is – at least in part – to move us beyond the limits of our prior knowledge. She wants us to imagine new, less precise and less totalising narratives about the mind, medicine and power; she invites us to think again about what happens at all of life's edges and in-betweens. For Anand, those projects are inescapably literary, born of her abiding love of fables and tales of magic, her enduring enchantment with folklore and the fantastic. It's plain to see that her imagination, in turn, underpins her skill as a physician. As this superb book shows, the human impulse to gather information, to put things into order – then speak, be understood and be believed – controls quite possibly every aspect of our lives.
