Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness

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.