The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head
The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head Books
- ISBN13: 9780300158601
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Product Description
In this pathbreaking book, one of Britain’s most eloquent and original thinkers writes about the head, what happens in it, and how it is and is not connected to our sense of identity and consciousness. Blending science, philosophy, and humor, Raymond Tallis examines the extraordinarily complex relationship we have with our heads. His aim, as he says, ?is to turn readers into astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for contracted the head that looks at them from the mirror.” Readers will delight that this is correctly what he accomplishes.
The voyage starts with a meditation on the self-portrait of a mirror image, followed by a consideration of the head’s various secretions. Tallis contemplates the air we exhale; the subtle meanings of nods, winks, and smiles; the mysteries of hearing, taste, and smell. He discusses the metaphysics of the stare, the meaning of kissing, and the processes by which the head comes to know the world. By the side of the way he offers intriguing digressions on such notions as ?having” and ?using” one’s head, and enjoying and suffering it. Tallis concludes with his thoughts on the very thing the reader’s head has been doing throughout the book: thought.
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A wonder-full book by this flamboyant doctor, psychologist, philosopher, wordsmith and pyrotechnical polymath about the processes going in your head, where four of our five sense are exclusively located.
He tells us that he will say very small about the brain; and what he does say is to belittle the claims of what he calls `neuromythology’. This self-denying ordinance seems to me at its most awkward during a long passage from pp.265 to 268, where he lists a range of things which are stored up in “the head”, but then sets up the Aunt Sally to say that “I, or my head, or my brain” are not like a computer. Some people – even some philosophers – may reckon that the brain is like a computer; but I guess that most people are aware of the difference.
With often sparkling wit (and occasionally with baroque convolutions of expression) he describes and meditates on everything from the taking in of breath to the discharging of saliva, mucus, sweat and tears. Of many of these processes we are scarcely, if at all, conscious; many of them involve very complicated mechanisms and a brew of ingredients; few of them can we control; and some of them run certainly counter to our wishes and interests. Here is a passage that gives you a flavour of Tallis’ writing:
“The particular cruelty of acne vulgaris is that it breaks out in adolescence, when one feels most defined by one’s corporal appearance. This is compounded by one of the body’s nastier small ironies: the hormone testosterone that makes boys achingly attracted to spotless beauties is also the most vital driver to the overproduction of sebum that makes them spottily unattractive.”
His discussion of breathing involves descriptions not only the physiological means of laughter but also the psychological situations which trigger different kinds of laughter, from the snigger to the bellow. An even more elaborate means, involving complex arrangements of tongue, lips, the oral hollow space, the glottis, the vocal cords etc is required for speech. But non-verbal communication can be just as demanding: there are 43 muscles that, in various combinations, shape about 3,000 meaningful facial expressions, from several kinds of smile to scowls. To such intentional signals we can add the unintentional one of the blush.
Then the eye: beginning with conveying the sense of wonder about the complexity of its structure, Tallis goes on to comment not only on looking but on being looked at, and on the meanings of the downcast stare.
The structure and operations of our auditory organs (there are up to 20,000 hair cells in the cochlea of the ear) are another miracle.
Our recognition of taste depends on about 5,000 taste buds in our mouths, and of smells on 10 million receptors at the back of our nasal hollow space. (Dogs have more than a billion such receptors.)
And eventually to the wrinkled skin and to the empty skull, and to Tallis’ reflections on our mortality.
From time to time he has indulged himself in digressions into areas which have nothing to do with the head – as, for example, in his disquisition on the origin of spelling. The chapter on kissing is worked (up) into a tale of frenzied anticipation – and never mentions what Freud had to say about the origins of oral gratification. But for the most part these digressions are plotting-provoking and have the wryness of observation, the richness of descriptions and the plays on words which are among Tallis’ hallmarks.
He is constantly amazed that our heads – or we as its owners – exist at all, the processes of their formation being near-infinitely complex and the odds hostile to their creation near-infinitely fantastic. Every now and again throughout the book he muses about the relationship between our Self and our body, particularly that part of our body – the head – in which we tend to locate our Self even as at the same time being aware that it is an object of our deliberation; and the reader – unless he yawns at those passages as too philosophical for his grasp or for his interest (and there is a disquisition on yawning also) – becomes caught up in the same mind-boggling conundrums as is Tallis himself. This is especially right of the trying last chapter, in which he worries where thoughts come from, to what extent we form them and to what extent they come to us unbidden, and where they are really located. But there are many illuminations in the earlier chapters for those who cannot follow Tallis to the end of his book.
Rating: 4 / 5
Where are you? Raymond Tallis wants to know. He is not asking about your corporal location; a GPS unit may possibly supply an resolution to such a simple question. Where are you surrounded by yourself? If someone kicks you in the leg, sure, the leg is part of you, and the kicker has surely kicked you, but the leg is in some way “out there”, it is literally a limb and is certainly distant from the “you” who feels the kick, or the “you” who might reckon about it or talk about it. Where that you is, and who that you is, are the themes in _The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head_ (Yale University Press). You may well have the feeling that the real you is somewhere in your head; perhaps you got this feeling because you learned long ago how the brain within your head is in payment of everything. You cannot feel your brain doing this work; it is all automatic, and though the brain is full of nerve cells, it has no cells assigned to do any feeling of pain or of bustling activity. The ancients plotting that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, and so its role in cognition was not everlastingly assumed. It feels to me, and it might feel to you, that my me is somewhere aptly behind my eyes, though if I question where those feelings are appearance from, I can’t feel their origin. Tallis’s serious but brightly written book has much to say about consciousness, but it starts off with a paradox: “This book about the head says small about the brain.” Tallis jokes, “First, be balanced the importance of the brain has not entirely escaped my attention.” The brain is the largest and most vital part of the head, but Tallis spends much more time on the head’s activities nearly the brain, the things that might make us reckon that the head is our headquarters.
“Selves are not cooked up, or stored, in brains,” Tallis writes. “Selves require bodies as well as brains, material environments as well as bodies, and societies as well as material environments.” So it is instructive to examine the head and its “outer” activities, because, Tallis clarifies, “the brain is absurdly over-rated”, and for all its power and mystery, a brain cannot constitute a whole being’s world. “I want to celebrate the mystery of the fact that we are embodied,” Tallis writes, and the celebration here has to do with the myriad non-brain activities of the head. Like secretions. Can you list them all? Well, there is saliva, of course. You will, quite automatically, slurp up nearly 30,000 liters of saliva during your lifetime, most of which you won’t reckon about at all. It is remarkable that we humans have taken secretion of saliva, a biological necessity, and place it below our conscious control, at least whenever we want it to be, for the purpose of insulting someone else, or to lick a stamp. Saliva has within it molecules that help fight infection, and so does ear wax. There’s mucus. There’s sweat, which is produced in other places of the body, of course, but sebum, a mixture of fats and dead cells from the hair follicles, is produced nearly all from the head. After all these, Tallis winds up with tears, “a secretion at last with a bit of class”. There is bounty here on the way humans use our heads to communicate by shaping air and making sounds, but bounty also on how heads communicate silently. Blushing is one way, as are the expressions that are hard wired into us; even congenitally blind people use the same expressions for rage, surprise, dread, and so on.
Tallis is a retired professor of medicine, which enables him to give physiological details about such head activities as kissing, yawning, or vomiting, or the skills of head-butting, or details of the worms and insects that will infest a lifeless head. He is also a poet, and his like of language is found throughout this plotting-provoking book. There are many gentle puns, such as his reflections on the use of Botox: “The wrinkles return and injections have to be repeated and, eventually, the face has to face up to the fact that it is no longer gorgeous; and to withstand the inattention that anticipates its ultimate effacement.” With all his physiological in rank about the extra-cranial activities of the head, Tallis succeeds in taking the focus away from the brain, a blow hostile to the “neuromythology” that reduces consciousness to intracranial processes only. He has no more solved the knotty problems of consciousness than the neurologically-based philosophers have, but the corporal / mental puzzle is probably intractable. What he has done is raise fascinating questions by reminding us that we are wonderfully complex embodied physiological masses, part of nature but everlastingly able to use nature to step out of ourselves and observe, and everlastingly pulled back into our corporal selves no matter how objective we try to be. The combination of philosophy and physiology proves to be a heady mix.
Rating: 5 / 5