Lisa Genova: As the neuroscientist in the family I really felt it was my responsibility to learn everything I could about Alzheimer's to help educate my family so they could better take care of her. She wrote it after her own 85-year-old gran walked in to a bowling alley in the middle of the night thinking it was day, prompting a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. But it's her first novel, Still Alice, that revealed Lisa's uncanny knack of getting inside the heads of people whose minds are under siege. In her new book Left Neglected we meet a top businesswoman whose brain is radically reshaped by a single moment.

She did her PhD at Harvard but traded her pipette for a pen to become a New York Times bestselling author, as you do. On All in the Mind today neuroscientist turned novelist, Dr Lisa Genova, is my guest. She's forgetting words here and there but after she gets lost on her daily jog in the neighbourhood she's lived in for 25 years she knows something is terribly wrong. Now Alice is 50, at the peak of her career as a Harvard psychology professor but still too young to be told she has Alzheimer's disease. Natasha Mitchell: It was the same day 32 years earlier that Alice's mother and sister Anna were killed in a car accident. She searched her doctor's eyes for something else but could only find truth and regret. She, Alice Howland, was sitting on a cold, hard chair next to an empty chair in a neurologist's office in the memory disorders unit on the 8th floor of Massachusetts General Hospital and she'd just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. She hadn't become a serial collection of molecules hovering in the corner of the room.

Reading: She searched his intelligent eyes for something else, she waited, she became strangely aware of her hands clenching the cold metal arms of the chair she sat in-her hands.

Lisa genova