How do we know we exist? What is the self? These are some of the questions science writer Anil Ananthaswamy asks in his thought-provoking new book, The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations Into the Strange New Science of the Self. The answers, he says, may lie in medical conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s or body integrity identity disorder, which causes some people to try and amputate their own limbs.

Speaking from Berkeley, California, he explains why Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton fell victim to the doppelgänger effect; how neuroscience is rewriting our ideas about identity; and how a song by George Harrison of the Beatles offers a critique of the Western view of the self.

We always hear within popular culture that we have