In late 2017, a good decade late, I finally got around to reading Norman Doidge’s bestselling brain bible, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. Ever since, I’ve been on the hunt for similarly stunning science writing that balances the rigorously academic with empathetic, clever storytelling. Amee Baird’s Sex in the Brain is this.

Amee Baird is a clinical neuropsychologist. Despite the title, Sex in the Brain isn’t just a book about neuroscience – it’s a book that tells illuminating, painful and absorbing human stories that also happen to be immaculately researched and relevant. Baird spent the four years of her PhD studying patients with epilepsy, observing changes in their sex drive and behaviours following brain surgery. Many patients experienced hypersexuality, sexual disinhibition, and greater attachment of emotional significance to sexual cues. Baird’s was the first study to record the amygdala’s role in sexuality. This also helped to explain individuals with other neurological conditions, such as dementia or a tumour, who experienced a change in their sexuality due to interference with the same region of the brain.

While some of the stories that detailed are very much amusing and intriguing, others are disturbing and deeply sad. Lives and families are broken by people whose sexuality manifested extreme and destructive changes as a result of surgery or disease.

Neurosurgeons rarely raise the question of sex with their patients, either out of hesitancy to broach a sensitive topic or perhaps simply because they are more concerned with the practical life-and-death reality of their work. Regardless, this reflects a broader blind spot in the field of neuroscience. There is still much to be learned about the mysterious human brain and the way it shapes our sexual behaviours. This book is a great place to start.

Reviewed by Emma Harvey