Our Brains, Our Selves: Masud Husain speaks about his new book
After years of success as a clinical neurologist and then academic, Professor Masud Husain has published a book: Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain. The book shows how modern neuroscience is helping us to understand how the brain creates our identities – our selves. Through the stories of seven remarkable people who come to see me in my clinic, we get to discover how our identities are the result of different brain functions. And we also get to see how identities can be transformed by disorders of the brain, like stroke or dementia. Each person we meet has a different perplexing symptom.
Masud writes:
This is a collection of the stories of only seven of my patients, over thirty years of being a neurologist. Each is fascinating in their own way but I realized that together they exemplify different aspects of brain damage that also help to reveal aspects of our selves – what it means to be human and have a sense of self. We often take our personal and social identities for granted, but these are not trivial to achieve. As these patients show us, when you lose just one aspect of brain function, there can be a profound alteration of both those forms of identity.
Masud was inspired to pursue a career in neuroscience and Neurology during his time as a medical student at ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ (1981-84). He then returned to ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ after
Speaking on his favourite story in Our Brains, Our Selves, Masud describes a young man who became apathetic following two tiny strokes that hit the brain regions involved in generation motivation:
He suddenly became very different. He couldn’t be bothered to do anything, including getting unemployment benefits after he’d been fired from his high flying job. His friends became frustrated and stopped engaging with him because he didn’t contribute in any way to the housework in their flat. His personal and social identities had changed. But once we understood why – by understanding the neuroscience underlying his apathy – we were able to restore his motivation using a drug that boosted this system in the brain.
Credit: Oliver Mayhall.
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Read Masud's interview for The Telegraph article .