Free The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self by Anil Ananthaswamy

then typing for you is an activity that does not require you to think about the location of keys on a keyboard. “Knowledge of typing,” Merleau-Ponty argues, “is in the hands and manifests itself only when bodily effort is made and cannot be articulated in detachment from that effort.”
    Bourdieu extended the role of the body beyond its primordial capacity: the body, he said, incorporates our social and cultural habits.This is what gave rise to the name “habitus.” “Habitus comprises dispositions and forms of know-how, which function below the threshold of cognition and are enacted at a prereflective level,” writes Kontos, where a disposition is “a way of being, a habitual state . . . a tendency, propensity, or inclination,” according to Bourdieu.
    Kontos combines Merleau-Ponty’s primordial body with Bourdieu’s habitus to come to her notion of embodied selfhood. “We all have embodied selfhood; you have it, I have it. It’s just that when our cognition is intact, it goes unnoticed; it is sort of in the background. But when we have cognitive impairment, it comes to the foreground,” she told me. “This prereflective ability to engage with the world becomes even more important in the face of cognitive impairment because it becomes the primary means of engaging with the world.”
    Embodied selfhood is blurring the distinction between body and mind; it gives the body its due in making us who we are. Thanks to Descartes, Western neuroscience had elevated the mind, demoting the body to being a mere container, and while neuroscience has slowly distanced itself from Descartes and done away with a stark split between body and mind, the legacy of centuries of such thinking still leads us astray when we attribute to Alzheimer’s patients a total loss of self. “Because of Cartesianism, and this constant devaluation of the body, what happens is that when we lose cognitive ability, people jump very quickly to the assumption that there is no self,” said Kontos. “But there is still this fundamental dimension of our existence that persists.” If we drop Descartes’s legacy entirely, and stop distinguishing between body and mind, a new perspective on the self begins to emerge.
    So, embodied selfhood involves the brain
and
the body, but in a way that does not necessarily involve cognition. The brain is broadly divided into three physical regions: the cerebral cortex, the cerebellum,and the brain stem. The cerebellum plays a significant role in procedural memory and in coordinating how our bodies move, and it survives more or less intact until the very late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. So, even as the cerebral cortex atrophies and cognition declines, some parts of the brain-body complex continue to store and play out aspects of our selfhood.
    Another person living with Alzheimer’s disease drove home this message for Kontos. She was an elderly woman, with cognitive impairment so severe that she could not speak, or even dress or feed herself, and was confined to her wheelchair. She was also incontinent. When the nursing staff would wheel her to the dining room and put a bib on her (institutional policy to prevent patients from soiling themselves), she’d struggle to reach under the bib and pull out a string of pearls that she wore, and rest it on top of the bib, where they could be seen. “She’d never begin her meal until she did that,” Kontos told me. “She emerges from the depths of dementia with a very strong presence. If that’s not self-expression, I don’t know what is.”
    But the making of a complex narrative selfhood (cognitive or embodied) might involve something even more fundamental: the ability to simply be the subject of an experience. When I met Allan, it was clear that despite his incoherent storytelling, he still was someone who was experiencing his own scrambled narrative. It’s possible that during the very late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when one’s narrative self is