About
Where science meets story
Neuroscience is usually met either as a textbook or as a headline. Neither is how it is actually encountered.
Most people meet the brain twice: once in a diagram, and once when something goes wrong with theirs or with someone they love. The gap between those two encounters is enormous, and very little writing sits inside it.
The Neuro Diary is an attempt to write from that gap. Each essay takes one thing — a symptom, a test, a mechanism, a moment in clinic — and follows it in both directions at once: down into the science that explains it, and outward into what it is like to be the person it is happening to.
What you will find here
Essays on memory, perception, seizures, stroke, pain and the strange specificity of neurological damage — how losing a few cubic millimetres of tissue can take away the ability to recognise faces while leaving everything else intact.
The science is not simplified into uselessness. Where a mechanism is genuinely uncertain, that gets said. Where the evidence is one small study, that gets said too.
What you will not find
No medical advice. Nothing here is a substitute for seeing a doctor, and no essay should be read as guidance about your own symptoms or anyone else's.
Where a patient encounter appears, identifying details are changed or composited. The clinical truth of a story matters; a particular person's privacy matters more.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I would rather know. Email me and I will fix it and say what changed.
New essays by email
One note a month at most, when there is something worth sending.