The electrome syndrome

Sally Adee has written an absorbing and fast-paced account of a field of research that could thus herald a whole new era of paradigm-shifting medicine

WE ARE ELECTRIC: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds

Author: Sally Adee

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 352

Price: $30
 

In the spring of 1969, I was committed to a British hospital — “asylum” was the word chiselled on its Victorian archway — where during my weeks of enforced residence I was given six memorably disagreeable jolts of electricity through my brain. It was the same treatment — electro-convulsive therapy, ECT — as was infamously administered to R P McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Though things didn’t turn out too well for the character, in