As her mother slips into the fog of dementia, a philosopher grapples with the unbreakable links between our bodies and our sense of self.   A diabetic woman awakens from a coma having forgotten the last ten years of her life. A Haitian immigrant has nightmares that begin bleeding into his waking hours. A retired teacher loses the use of her right hand due to pain of no known origin.  Noga Arikha began studying these patients and their confounding symptoms in order to explore how our physical experiences inform our identities. Soon after she initiated her work, the question took on unexpected urgency, as Arikha’s own mother began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease.  Weaving together stories of her subjects’ troubles and her mother’s decline, Arikha searches for some meaning in the science she has set out to study. The result is an unforgettable journey across the ever-shifting boundaries between ourselves and each other. 

Noga Arikha is a philosopher, historian of ideas and science humanist. She is an Associate Fellow of the Warburg Institute, Research Associate at the Institut Jean Nicod, and member of the SPHERE Research Unit. Her first book, Passions and Tempers, was a New York Times Review Editor's Choice and one of the Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Books. Her second, co-authored with her husband Marcello Simonetta, was Napoleon and the Rebel.