The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy

The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self by Anil Ananthaswamy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love articles about neuroscience so I'm trying to read more books about it. There is nothing more central to who we are as humans. Ananthaswamy discusses a number of disorders that cause disassociation to the self or a small part of the self. There were some new concepts and big surprises here for me: There are people who have the opposite of a ghost limb-- where they possess a limb they believe is not theirs: "alien limb." People with Cotard’s syndrome think they are dead.

The thing that's interesting about these disorders is that they teach us about the underlying mechanisms of the brain. There are so many components in the brain that function to differentiate the self from the outside world that it seems like it is the harder position to maintain.

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