The links in our bio

What makes it possible for us to hum a tune 'without thinking', choose the right footwear, make a joke? What does the fallout look like, when one of these unnoticed abilities begins to waver? In his award-winning first book, Dr Masud Husain, a professor of neurology at Oxford, traces how intricately different parts of our brain tether us to our shared reality. And what happens - to individuals, families, shared lives - when one of those tethers snaps

- Sukanya Datta

A man is slowly running out of words.

A woman thinks she's having an affair, with the person who is really her partner.

Another woman appears to have lost all control over one arm and leg; they do exactly as they please, when she isn’t watching.

How changes in the brain slowly alter who we are, and then creep into social circles to tamper with our closest bonds, is the subject of a new book by neuroscientist and neurologist Dr Masud Husain, 63.

Earlier this month, Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain, his debut, won the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. “I'm thrilled and very surprised. I wasn’t expecting the prize at all,” he says.

What stands out in the book is the human element; something that is often missing or minimised in books that seek to explain what we know about the human brain. Dr Husain puts the person, their distress and the fallout on their lives at the heart of things.

Also woven into the narrative are threads from Dr Husain’s own struggles with belonging. His family moved to the UK from what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) when he was five. He speaks in the book of the intense efforts he made, as a child, to sound less different and to fit in better.

As an adult, he became fascinated by what makes each of us who we are, and what works to unite people or divide them.

For 30 years, Dr Husain has researched the role played in this by the giant, bewildering jigsaw that is the brain. A professor of neurology and cognitive neuroscience at University of Oxford, his focus has been behaviour, memory, attention, motivation.