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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Moheb Costandi, "Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness" (MIT Press, 2022)
Description: 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: The New Science of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 2022), Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the bo...