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.
