Dr. Pria Anand at BioMed Realty

Harvard Book Store and BioMed Realty welcome Dr. Pria Anand—neurologist at the Boston Medical Center and an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine—for a discussion of her new book The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. She will be joined in conversation by Dr. Jason Silverstein—writer and anthropologist in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Media, Medicine, and Health Programs.

This event is the second event in our newly announced BioMed Realty Discover Here Author Series, an engaging collaboration between BioMed Realty and Harvard Book Store. This series will feature thought-provoking talks by authors of recently published books on a variety of topics, including science, mental wellness, AI, history, and more. Each event includes an insightful discussion or presentation, followed by light refreshments and a book signing by the author. The series is open to both tenants of BioMed Realty and the general public.

There are two ticket options available for this event.

Free General Admission Ticket: Includes admission for one.

Book-Included Ticket: Includes admission for one and one hardcover copy of The Mind Electric.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

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 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.

Dr. 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 Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Jason Silverstein is a writer and anthropologist in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Media, Medicine, and Health Programs. His feature script about a civil rights-era cold case, The Cold After, appears on The Black List’s Top List. His reporting and essays on racism, health, and human rights have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.

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