March Narrative Medicine Rounds with Dr. Pria Anand

For our March Rounds, we are delighted to be joined by neurologist Dr. Pria Anand, the author of The Mind Electric, named a Best Book of June and Best Science & Technology Book of 2025 by Barnes & Noble, a Best Book of 2025 by Publisher’s Weekly, and a Best Book of the Summer by The Observer, The Globe and Mail, and Book Riot and longlisted for the PEN America E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. 

In The Mind Electric, a girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient's story and the tells of their body.

Stories are etched into the very structure of our brains, coded so deeply that the impulse for storytelling survives and even surges after the most devastating injuries. But our brains are also porous—the stories they concoct shaped by cultural narratives about bodies and illness that permeate the minds of doctors and patients alike. In the history of medicine, some stories are heard, while others—the narratives of women, of Black and brown people, of displaced people, of disempowered people—are too often dismissed.

Neurologist Dr. Pria Anand reveals—through case study, history, fable, and memoir—all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story.

Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.

Dr. Anand has written for the New York Review of Books, Boston Globe, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Time Magazine, and Ploughshares. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She is now an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and she cares for patients at the Boston Medical Center.

Dr. Michelle Bell is an associate professor of neurology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUMC), in the Division of Epilepsy. Dr. Bell obtained her undergraduate degree from Harvard University, followed by a medical doctorate at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. During medical school, she was valedictorian of her graduating class and was also inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. Dr. Bell then pursued her medicine internship and neurology residency at Columbia University. During residency, she was awarded the Daniel Sciarra Award for her commitment to patient care and humanism as well as the Department of Medicine House Office Award for her dedication to the Internal Medicine residents and their patients.

After residency, Dr. Bell served for one year as chief resident, then completed a two-year fellowship in Clinical Neurophysiology/Epilepsy.

Dr. Bell was the recipient of the Lewis P. Rowland Resident Teaching Award in 2017, the Richard Mayeux Award in 2021, and the Stephen Shafer Humanism in Neurology Award in 2023.

She is a professional advisory board member for the National Epilepsy Foundation and the Epilepsy Foundation of Metropolitan New York.

She is also currently the Vice Chair of Education for the department and the Program Director for the Adult Neurology Residency Program.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds held on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year, hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them.