One of America’s preeminent neurosurgeons and the author of Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, DR. THEODORE H. SCHWARTZ has spent his career investigating some of the most complex and perplexing questions about the threeand- a-half pounds of tissue that determines the very nature of ourselves and our lives. Perhaps no question in neuroscience—or, for that matter, in philosophy and psychology—is more mysterious than that of identity, how it is that we know and feel ourselves to be who we are. Perhaps the only thing that can be said for certain is that whatever identity is or isn’t, it originates, somehow, in the brain. In conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist AYAD AKHTAR, Dr. Schwartz will shine a light for us into the darkness.