Book Review: 'The Man Who Wasn’t There' by Anil Ananthaswamy

Book: The Man Who Wasn’t There​
Author: Anil Ananthaswamy
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 499

There’s much that the man who isn’t there – the one who is not inhabiting the shirt and the shoe on the teal-hued cover of Anil Ananthaswamy’s book – can tell us. Perhaps this is how he sees himself when he has an out-of-body experience. Or, maybe, the image is representative of the difficulty he has in relating to others. Maybe this is the early onset of Alzheimer’s. Or could it be an extreme case of depersonalisation?

The phantom image ushers the reader into a 266-page exploration of the self – a journey that is rooted in neuroscience research and enriched with philosophical perspectives. Like an archaeologist, Ananthaswamy works bit by bit to deftly unearth the nature of the self and its many facets. What do we really mean by self; is it real or an illusion; is this ‘self’ linked to the mind or to the body (brain); are newborns born with a self; if not, when and how does this ‘self’ start to form; are our memories involved in building our narrative self; and most importantly, what does this ‘self’ say about ‘who am I?’.

He tries to find answers to these questions by taking us through the lives of people whose tribulations have aided our comprehension of the self. For instance, in explaining the widely-debated Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) – in which sufferers don’t identify with their able bodies and have a deep desire to amputate their limbs, he writes: “Your sense of self, like mine, is probably tied to a body that has its entire complement of limbs. I can’t bear the thought of someone taking a scalpel to my thigh. It’s my thigh. I take that sense of ownership for granted. This isn’t the case for BIID sufferers, and it wasn’t the case for David. When I asked him to describe how his leg felt, he said, “‘It feels like my soul doesn’t extend into it.’”

But if the sense of self in some is tied to a body part, there are others like Nicholas, for whom the sense of self is completely alienated from the body and emotion. As Ananthaswamy notes: “People with depersonalisation find it hard to put their experiences into words, resorting mainly to metaphors. ‘The actual disconnect itself is very challenging to describe,’ Nicholas told me. ‘It feels like your physical body is not you.’” 

Be it Alzheimer’s, which erodes one’s narrative self, or schizophrenia, which involves a “disruption of a basic form of selfhood”, the book delves into each mental illness with a sharp focus on the regions of the brain that are affected/impaired and how they underpin the sense of self. Ananthaswamy is particular about laying out the premise and explaining the details of experiments. But it is the dozens of vivid narratives of people – bizarre, overwhelming and evocative – and a persuasive writing style that makes The Man Who Wasn’t There, Tales from the Edge of the Self accessible. Insights from Buddhist and Advaita philosophy poignantly sum up the quandary that any exploration of this subject is bound to stumble upon. First released in 2015, the book was nominated for the 2016 PEN/EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.