Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain
by Masud Husain
Summary
Husain's book is built from seven patients, seven people whose brain disorders each dissolved a different pillar of what we casually call the self, and the through line is in his title: the self is not a soul watching from somewhere behind the eyes but a performance of brain systems, discoverable because each can fail separately.
The cases are told at full human length, clinic visits, families, aftermaths, before the neuroscience arrives. A young man whose tiny strokes in circuits most people have never heard of erase motivation itself, apathy so profound he no longer cares that he does not care, and the system of dopamine and effort that Husain's own research group has spent years mapping. A man whose damaged memory unmoors him from his own biography; a patient whose neglect deletes half of space, breakfast eaten from one side of the plate; hallucinated presences more vivid than the living; a lost language and with it a social self; delusion holding a mind hostage while every faculty of logic stands by intact. Around each story the relevant science is folded in with a working clinician's authority, and with an immigrant doctor's alertness, threaded quietly through, to how much selfhood also depends on being recognised, by families and by societies that can withdraw the recognition.
The clinical tradition is declared, Luria and Sacks, and honoured by judges who singled out beautiful storytelling joined with rigorous science.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the neurology of identity taught through people rather than diagrams, by a physician who plainly loves both.
Historical Context & Significance
Our Brains, Our Selves won the Royal Society Trivedi prize in 2025, a debut from a working clinician: Masud Husain is professor of neurology and cognitive neuroscience at Oxford, a practising consultant whose research on motivation and apathy appears, anonymised, among the book's own cases. The judges' citation led with its humanity, calling the book a beautiful exploration of how problems in the brain can cause people to lose their sense of self, such that they become unrecognizable to loved ones or at times rejected by a society to which they felt they belonged.
The win placed the book explicitly in the lineage of the clinical tale, the tradition Oliver Sacks carried from Luria into general readership and whose shelf had thinned since his death; reviewers made the comparison at once, and the prize confirmed the appetite.
Husain, who edits the neurology journal Brain, became the latest exhibit in this prize's oldest pattern, the researcher who turns out to be a writer.