How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we
perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia,
and other phenomena.
The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for
self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos,
and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says
scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body
Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that
perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how
that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he
explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are
disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and
amputee fetishes.
Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body
that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models
are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing on recent bodily
awareness research, the new science of self-consciousness, and
historical milestones in neurology, he describes a range of psychiatric
and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of
sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also
phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity
disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy
arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia.
Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, Body Am I (the title comes
from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra) offers new insight into
self-consciousness by describing it in terms of bodily awareness.
