Our Brains, Our Selves is shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Society Science Book Prize, supported by the Trivedi Family Foundation.
About the book
Is it our background that creates our identities? Or our families, where we lived, how we were brought up and educated, the jobs we’ve held? Yes, all of the above, but more fundamental than any of these is our brain. This is never more evident than if we lose even a single one of our cognitive abilities. People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes.
Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create our identity, how that identity can be changed, and sometimes even be restored. Among the people we encounter is a man who used to be the life and soul of the party but has now become profoundly apathetic. Another who ran out of words. And a woman who believed she was having an affair with the man who was really her husband.
About the author
Masud Husain is Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. He is a practising clinician with over 30 years’ experience of seeing people with neurological conditions Unusually, he works across departments of neuroscience, brain imaging and psychology to understand cognitive functions in both healthy people and patients with brain disorders - stroke, vascular dementia, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Born in Bangladesh, Masud moved to the United Kingdom as a child, growing up in inner city London and Birmingham. Masud is Editor-in-Chief of Brain, a leading international journal of neurology. First established in 1878, Brain is widely considered to be the most influential publication in the field, with its monthly editorials being a key source of authoritative perspectives.
