The Mind Electric : Pria Anand's book bridges myth, mind, and medicine

From sleep disorders to fear of the dark, a neurologist's book explores why the brain functions the way it does

The Mind Electric: Stories of the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains 

by Pria Anand 

Published by Virago Press

275 pages  ₹599

  Around 2000, we were tenants in a huge house owned by a Punjabi family, who lived on the ground floor. Their elder son was so incredibly handsome that the aunties questioned why he was still a “bachelor.”

 

One day, we discovered why. Returning from tuition, I found a crowd of people gathered around this handsome man. Two friends were trying to unclasp his clenched fist. He lay on the ground at an awkward angle. His head was vibrating as it was an organ independent of his body. Someone brought a small piece of wood and forced it into his mouth to ensure he didn’t end up biting his tongue. Several aunties were trying to make him sniff socks and sandals. He had suffered  mirgi ka daura, an epilepsy attack.

 

A decade later, in a house of our own, we organised a jagaran. During one of the bhajan performances, an aunt experienced the trance-like state of mata — a phenomenon that still baffles me. In Class XI, my English teacher touched on this issue while discussing Jayant Narlikar’s story The Adventure. “Why do you think some people have those out-of-body experiences? Or are they really that?” the teacher asked.

 

While science may not have come closer to articulating why the brain functions the way it does, can’t it at least provide a better story to deal with, or make sense of these things?  If you want to quench your thirst for the more bewildering aspects of the mind, Pria Anand’s book, The Mind Electric: Stories of the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains is a worthy read.

 

On April 2, 2026, the American neurologist of Indian origin won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for this book. In popular culture, science writing doesn’t inspire enough purchase, partly because many science writers fail to accept the fact that there’s no escaping telling a good story. This is what Dr Anand manages to demonstrate in each of the 11 chapters of her book.

 

It begins with an exceptional introduction titled “Fables and Confabulations”, in which the author notes her desire “to learn how to uncover the body’s truths and prophecies”. This tiny marvel of a thought was in itself a product of lifelong engagement with stories. As a child, fearing the “cavernous silence”, the author “gravitated towards the fantastical, to Sanskrit folklore and German fairy tales”.

 

She writes, “The human desire for narrative, the impulse to tell and hear stories, is both universal and inexorable, coded into our brains so deeply across multiple networks that it often survives and even surges after the most devastating of brain injuries.” It is this connection that she manages to sustain throughout the book.

 

Sample this: A 19-year-old woman comes to you, informing you that the cause of her blindness is kissing someone in the church parking lot. What must a doctor do when their patient’s unshakeable belief in their narrative comes before the former’s performance of care? “Belief”, “narrative”, and “performance” are key here. Not only in the sentence but in the book, too, as Dr Anand relates the story of Jean-Martin Charcot, “the Napoleon of the neuroses”, in the first chapter of the book, referencing him in relation to hysteria and studying him through the influence of performing arts.

 

As someone struggling with sleeping disorders, trauma, and the thirst for stories, nothing else drew me in like the second chapter, “Sleep No More”. Dr Anand writes, “In literature, sleep is often treated as a dead space, time stolen from story.”  Reading this sentence and others made me wonder perhaps this was the reason Dr Anand’s writing attracted favourable comparisons with Oliver Sacks.

 

Having received her book much earlier, I had set it aside, for I had come to learn about fabrications — or “confabulations”— in Sacks’ literary works. The “poet laureate of contemporary medicine” had misreported, according to Rachel Aviv’s expose in the New Yorker. In the light of this, I wondered if I should continue reading The Mind Electric, but when I did, I realised how markedly different Dr Anand’s prose is from Sacks (almost all of whom and his partner’s works I’ve read). The former’s prose doesn’t perform liminality; it addresses its potential.

 

Like “sleep paralysis”, there are many such “border zones”— the liminal space — that Dr Anand describes, and one of them is that of “seizurea”. One neurologists connected them with “dreamy states”. In the chapter writing about it, she invokes Dostoevsky. A literary figure again. In another chapter, she invokes a Hindu fable “of the blind men and the elephant”, submitting from the Vedas this “wondrous” explanation —“Reality is one, though wise men speak of it variously.” In the vast variety of storytelling, one of the distinct science voices that would lead us closer to truth — reality via fables — would most definitely be hers.

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The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and culture critic.  @writerly_life