Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist and former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. He is a freelance feature editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science's Front Matter. He contributes regularly to the New Scientist, and has also written for Nature, National Geographic News, Discover, Nautilus, Matter, the Wall Street Journal and the UK's Literary Review. His first book, The Edge of Physics, was voted book of the year in 2010 by Physics World, and his second book, The Man Who Wasn't There, won a Nautilus Book Award in 2015 and was long-listed for the Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award (2016).Anil Ananthaswamy offers an intimate look at the latest neuroscience of schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and Cotard's syndrome among others to reveal the awesome power of the human sense of self. Extensive in-depth interviews venture into the lives of individuals who offer remarkable, sometimes heart-wrenching insights. One man cut off his own leg. Another became one with the universe. Where in the brain, or mind, or body is the self actually located? As Ananthaswamy elegantly reports, neuroscientists themselves now see that the elusive sense of self is both everywhere and nowhere in the brain. The Man Who Wasn't There takes readers on an emotional, scientific, and intellectual journey, arriving at a new visceral understanding of something we have wondered about since humans existed.
