The Mind Electric: The Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

A Virtual Chat with Neurologist Pria Anand

Join us for a virtual author talk with neurologist Pria Anand, as she discusses her new book, The Mind Electric, how our brains catalog our experiences, and how medicine interprets our stories.

Join us for a virtual chat with neurologist and author Pria Anand, as she discusses her new book, The Mind Electric: The Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

Register to ask the author questions and attend this live virtual event here.

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, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story.

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, she 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 Author:

Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric, out from Simon & Schuster (U.S.) and Little, Brown (U.K.) in June 2025. Her stories and essays have appeared in Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She is now an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and she cares for patients at the Boston Medical Center.

This program is brought to you through the generosity of the Friends of the Reading Public Library. Thank you, Friends!

Check out more upcoming virtual author talks and enjoy recordings from past events by exploring our Friends Speaker Series page.

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