The New Scientist Book Club moved away from science fiction for October's reading and turned to The New Scientist. winner instead we received the Royal Society's Trivedi Science Book Award, serendipitously announced just in time for us to begin our next literary adventure.
Six books from Daniel Levitin's book were nominated for the prize. Music as medicine to Sadia Qureshi Gone: An Unnatural History of Extinction. Judges chose Masood Hussein Our brain, ourselves: what a neurologist’s patients told him about the brain and they praised it glowingly, calling it “an excellent study of how problems in the brain can cause people to lose their sense of self-worth” and citing how these case histories “are cleverly intertwined with Hussain's personal story of moving to Britain as an immigrant in the 1960s, where he found himself struggling with his own sense of belonging.”
The first thing to say is that our book club members are much stricter judges than the Royal Society Prize judges! While I think we were excited to get our hands on this book and delve into the world of nonfiction for a change, there were many questions that were raised and picked by our readers.
Let's look at the positives first. For me, the book really got me thinking towards the end when Hussein addressed the idea of self, how it has changed over the centuries, and how the brain conditions discussed in previous chapters affected the sense of self of each of Hussein's patients.
Katherine Sarah agreed with this aspect. “Not only is it an interesting insight into the brain and how it works, but it also explores what defines the self and the important skills that make us accepted by society,” she writes in our article. Facebook group. Katherine has an interesting perspective on this because she went to live in another country where she couldn't speak the language, which she felt isolated her.
“I really loved how much language represents a part of yourself and how difficult it is to portray yourself without it,” she writes. “Interestingly, this also related to motivation, which was suppressed in another patient the author described. When I was unable to communicate in the language of my new country, I also became extremely shy and had difficulty motivating myself to complete simple tasks. It is very interesting to read in this book about patients who have only one specific aspect of their brain/personality inhibited, because in reality everything is connected.”
Gosia Furmanik also liked this part of the book. “For the most part, I enjoyed it – I thought it was engagingly written, easy to read and the cases were interesting. I also liked the reflections on identity and migration at the end of the book, which may have been relevant to me because I have migrated twice in my life,” she writes.
Judith Lazell was a fan: “It's very interesting and very readable. A great choice,” she says. And Jennifer Marano liked the chapter about Wahid, a bus driver who develops Lewy body dementia and begins hallucinating. “What has changed most is my understanding of vision, including hallucinations,” she writes. “The world has always seemed so solid and real, but what I see is what my brain makes of the stimuli that enter my eyes. Makes me wonder what other people 'see'.”
When I spoke to Husseinone of the things I wanted to ask him about was how he put it all together because it seemed a little contrived in places, like the way he was, say, walking around Soho thinking about a recent patient and then noticing a plaque for Samuel Johnson. “The irony made me smile,” he writes. “That day I met a man who had difficulty remembering words, and here was the refuge of the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the man who compiled the first English dictionary of any note.” Tell me a few paragraphs about lexicography.
Hussein explained in our chat how he makes up cases to protect patients and writes the narrative, so it makes sense that he would need to piece the story together. But like I said, it felt a little forced to me.
Niall Leighton also disliked this aspect of the book, but expressed particular dissatisfaction with the patient discussions that Hussein writes about. “I quickly realized that much of Dr. Hussein's dialogue with patients seemed stilted, and I wondered how this, along with his descriptions of other events, might be somewhat, even largely, fictional,” he writes. “As the book progressed, it became more and more annoying.”
Gosia agreed: “I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed (and was annoyed by) these things in the book! In an interview, the author said that he made up a lot of things about the patients to make them unrecognizable so that it could explain the dialogue, it was probably all made up.”
Others wrote about how irritated you were by Hussein's flowery language. “At times it seemed as if the author would actually prefer to write a ‘great British novel’ with florid descriptions, which I found annoying in the context of a non-fiction book,” Jennifer writes.
Judith and Niall also found it disturbing how Hussein included definitions of words in brackets, such as “vertebrates (animals with a backbone).” “I thought anyone who reads this book would know this,” says Judith.
“I don’t know why he felt the need to insult my intelligence by defining words like ‘atrophied’, ‘neuron’ and even ‘vertebrate’ (more than once),” Niall says. “It may have been the actions of an overzealous editor, but I was left wondering who he thought his audience was.”
Personally, I think this is a challenge: our book club members are a fairly informed group and probably know the meanings of these terms well, but the tradeoff between being informative and patronizing is very difficult.
The real problem for some members was Hussein's use of the word “normal” when talking about brain diseases. For example, describing the tests he carried out on David, who had lost motivation after two small strokes, he writes: “We made him take the traffic light test again, and this time he behaved differently. Like normal people, he began to take risks.”
“Some phrases, for example… referring to healthy people as 'normal', really irritated me. What is normal anyway? Who gets to decide that?” – asks Gosya. “Unhealthy people are still normal, illness and disease are completely normal aspects of the human condition. For such a philosophically inclined book, this seemed egregious.”
Niall agreed. “I quickly discovered that I was extremely alienated… I am neurodivergent, and using the word ‘normal’ would be jarring simply because the very question of what constitutes ‘normal’ is controversial,” he writes.
Jennifer may have had issues with Our brain, ourselvesbut she reached the end and says that she is glad about it. “After finishing it, I watched part of the New Scientist author interview and it made me feel more tolerant of the aspects of the book that confused me,” she says. “In the end, I had to give him credit for being enthusiastic about his work and writing a book and publishing it, which is something I have not done and will probably never do in my life.”
Never say never, Jennifer: maybe one day we'll read your book at The New Scientist Book Club! In the meantime, we're on to November's read, another book that delves into the mysteries of the brain, but this time through science fiction. Come and find out more about Grace Chan's Every version of youThe story takes place in a devastated version of our world, where a desperate humanity downloads itself into a virtual utopia to escape a dying reality. But how will these virtual brains compare to those left behind?
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