my grandfather, he was this really

larger than life figure in my childhood.

He was this, he made films for the Indian government He he'd spent his whole life in India, but he had in the 40s somehow managed to find his way into an American troop ship and visit Los Angeles and had all these really beautiful stories about meeting movie stars and and visiting film sets.

And and just really was this was this person who was full of stories and life and really shaped my childhood.

And he started to fall sick in this really.

strange and particular way.

So he was a really kind of tall, big guy.

What do you think confabulation can teach us about the stories we all construct to make sense of the world? And also, how do you view the relationship between confabulation coming from the brain and AI hallucinations?

[laughs]

Um, and I'm so delighted to be here at the Commonwealth Club.

Um, I, so I, um, I didn't, I didn't come to medicine early in my life.

I didn't know.

I wasn't one of those children who kind of walks around with a stethoscope and knows that they wanna be a doctor.

Um, but two things happened that sort of brought me to neurology.

Um, the one that happened later was that as I was going through medical school and trying to figure out what kind of doctor I wanted to be, my grandfather in India, uh, started to fall sick, and he fell sick in this really particular way.

Tell us about- Some of the cases you write about, um, that change your understanding of what a symptom can mean.

Like, what made you make a transition from writing and journalism to a career and a path into training for medical school?

When I was in college, I had a summer job in New Haven where I, I worked for a group that was, I was a case man- essentially a medical case manager for people who were living with HIV in the, in the Connecticut prison system who were coming out of prison and transitioning back into the community.

And I got that job because I was interested in interviewing.

I was interested in talking to people who'd had very, very different experiences from me.

I was interested in the criminal justice system as a, as a journalist.

But kind of walking through that, I think what I loved about journalism is this idea that you could tell someone's really particular story in a way that it could resonate with many, many other people.

And I think having that job, I realized that there, if there is a universal story, it is the story of bodies and illness, and this idea that like, you know, that I could connect with someone who had such a different experience from me, and one of the things that sort of, that we could connect on was, was what they were experiencing in their body and these kind of like really human frailties.

What can we do to be better?

If it's just a series of synapses working in a certain way producing one kind of reality, and that all can change abruptly with a few little electric quirks going in one direction or another, then what is real?

I think that's such a great observation.

I...

So one of the, one of the inspirations for the book is a particular symptom that I have seen many times in people who have brain injuries.

It's called confabulation.

And what confabulation is, is essentially w- when someone is missing information.

So let's say someone has a brain injury that causes them to have amnesia.

Can you help someone, first of all, understand the process of becoming a doctor? What are the steps?