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The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes.

Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing on recent bodily awareness research, the new science of self-consciousness, and historical milestones in neurology, he describes a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders that result when body and brain are out of sync, including not only the well-known phantom limb syndrome but also phantom breast and phantom penis syndromes; body integrity identity disorder, which compels a person to disown and then amputate a healthy arm or leg; and such eating disorders as anorexia.

Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, Body Am I (the title comes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra) offers new insight into self-consciousness by describing it in terms of bodily awareness.

Strange Frequencies takes readers on an extraordinary narrative and historical journey to discover how people have used technology in an effort to search for our own immortality. Bebergal builds his own ghostly gadgets to reach the other side, too, and follows the path of famous inventors, engineers, seekers, and seers who attempted to answer life’s ultimate mysteries. He finds that not only are technological innovations potent metaphors keeping our spiritual explorations alive, but literal tools through which to experiment the boundaries of the physical world and our own psyches.

Peter takes the reader alongside as he explores:
– the legend of the golem and the strange history of automata;
– a photographer who is trying to capture the physical manifestation of spirits;
– a homemaker who has recorded voicemails from the dead;
– a stage magician who combines magic and technology to alter his audience’s consciousness;
and more.

Finding Normal explores how people are using the internet to find community, forge connections, and create identity in ways that challenge a variety of sexual norms. Based on a highly candid interview series conducted for New York magazine’s human science column―”What It’s Like”―each story in Finding Normal intimately immerses the reader in the world of a person who is grappling with a unique set of circumstances relating to sexuality.

Finding Normal at once celebrates the power of our evolving media landscape for helping people rewrite the script for their lives and offers a warning about the danger of that seemingly limitless freedom. Tsoulis-Reay shows the enduring power of the search for belonging―for humans and society. Like happiness of life purpose, finding normal is perhaps the definitive human struggle.