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

completely destroyed, all that is left is the self-as-subject, experiencing those aspects of the self that exist even before a narrative forms. One could argue that the self at its most fundamental is the self-as-subject, and it’s not one’s narrative. Who or what is this self-as-subject? Sadly, those in the grips of the disease cannot communicate what it’s like to be without a narrative—and it’d be too cruel to ask.
    We have to turn to clues from elsewhere to understand the basis of this subjectivity. For example, for touch-typing to become an embodied ability and a part of my extended narrative self, do I need to feel the touch of a key at my fingertips and know that
I touched the key
, as opposed to feeling as if someone else was doing it? Or, for that matter, don’t I need to feel that my fingers are
my own
? These might seem like outrageous questions, but the next chapter will show that something we take for granted—ownership of body parts—can be disrupted, in experiments and pathologically. When it’s the latter, the consequences can be unimaginably dire.

    Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” is playing on the car radio as I pull into the parking lot of the assisted-living facility to see Clare’s father. “
What’s the matter with the clothes I’m wearing / Can’t you tell that your tie’s too wide
?” The California afternoon sun is hot, accentuated by my car’s barely functional air-conditioning. Clare is waiting outside the building for me. She punches a security code to enter, a precaution not to prevent outsiders from entering, but rather to keep the residents—mainly patients with Alzheimer’s—from wandering out, which they tend to do. We walk down the corridors, past her dad’s room (a sign wishing him a happy birthday when he turned ninety last month still hangs on the door). A couple of elderly ladies smile at us and one says, “Good morning.” After a moment’s pause she adds, “Or good afternoon, I don’t know.” I can’t tell whether she’s indulging in some inside humor or not. Either way, it imbues the place with a tender resilience.
    We go to see Clare’s father in a large hall. It’s a scene I have seen only in movies. About twenty men and women, all elderly, are sitting,some slumped over, some relatively alert. A television set is playing a movie, loudly. It’s a recent Michael Caine movie (
Last Love
, I find out later). Clare points to her dad—he’s sitting in his own chair, which Clare’s mother had brought over so that he’d be more comfortable than in the standard-issue chairs. He is asleep. Clare walks over and gently nudges him. “Dad, Dad,” she says. He wakes up perturbed, agitated. Clare reaches for his hands, but he angrily swats at her hand. She tries again to hold his hand, and he reaches out in a handshake gesture, only to twist her hand. She pulls away. He’s clearly upset at being woken up. We leave him for the moment and go to his room.
    Clare has a key to enter her dad’s room—the rooms are locked because otherwise the patients would go around opening doors and entering. The room is simple and sparse. Framed pictures hang on the walls, reminders of Clare’s father’s life. There’s one of him looking handsome at the wheel of a sailboat. There are many family photographs. On the table is a scrapbook made of colored construction paper, the kind a child would make. It’s actually something Clare’s sister has made for their dad—a simple storybook of some key moments in his life: a photograph of him when he was seventeen; Clare’s dad and mother signing the marriage register in Europe; their fellow rowers holding up their oars to form an arch for the bride and groom to walk under as they come out of the church; the family at a beach in Morro Bay, California, after they had come to America—Clare and her sisters are little girls; their home in Minnesota, where Clare grew up; building a barbecue pit at home (one of