Our Brains Our Selves By Masud Husain — Review

A frightening but fascinating book that reveals how our personalities and identities hang by the slenderest of neurological threads.

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What makes us who we are? What happens to our sense of self if we develop a brain disorder that changes our personality? What makes us each an individual who is different from others? Is it possible to change one’s personality or social identity literally overnight? These ideas are the main questions that Masud Husain, a professor of neurology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford, explores in the highly readable narrative Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain (2025; Canongate Books / Bookshop.org).

In this book (269 pages long, with one page of further readings, 15 pages of references, and a nine-page index), Professor Husain tells the fascinating stories of seven people who came to him for help over the years after they’d suffered some form of brain disorder that left them, their families and their friends baffled about their startling and mysterious personality changes — changes so dramatic that it was suddenly…