Review Of Anil Ananthaswamy's The Man Who Wasn T There

For average people, we take our unified sense of self for granted. We find comfort in the familiarity of our bodies, we control our actions, whether playing the piano or picking up a ball and experience our emotions knowing that they belong to us. We have the ability to remember key moments that provided turning points to our character. This sense of self appears to us naturally. However The Man Who Wasn’t There provides insight to individuals who suffer with ‘maladies of the self’. These conditions present a unique perception into a self that has been fragmented from disorders that include Asperger's, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. Anil Ananthaswamy’s ability to effectively transition from intriguing accounts of patient experiences to neurological research allows the reader to understand the connection between our body, mind and brain with ease. A former staff of New Scientist and winner of the Physics Journalism Prize, Ananthaswamy uses a methodical and organized approach to narrate his

As Ananthaswamy concisely puts it, the process of episodic memories getting converted to semantic memories the process is disrupted in Alzheimer’s. Our narrative self derives from episodic memories that define who we are. Cognitive memories contain aspects of our selfhood. When access to these are compromised one begins to become someone they are not. Alzheimer’s is not just a problem of memory — it’s a problem of self. “It reflects a very selective inability of updating information about you” (43). It provides knowledge about ourselves, information on self-representation. So if we cannot have access to old ones, does that deplete who we are? Ananthaswamy argues that in some way, people with Alzheimer’s. Or is our character still there despite the brain eroding away? From this excerpt, we can see that for Clare’s dad, his memories might not be gone completely. That his character still exists. That maybe while his narrative is scrambled, his sense of self is not