Literature and the brain

Paul Kalanithi grew up in Kingman, Arizona, where his mother encouraged a love of reading. At Stanford he studied English literature and human biology, fascinated by how the brain gives rise to meaning, language and relationships. He went on to study the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge.

He came to feel that books alone could not answer his questions about life and death. Medicine, he decided, would let him face those questions directly, so he went to medical school at Yale.