Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness

by Tim Parks

Hardly a day goes by without some discussion about whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether the mind is a unique quality of human beings or is spread out across the universe like butter on bread. Most philosophers believe that our experience is locked inside our skulls, an unreliable representation of a quite different reality outside. Color, smell, and sound, they tell us, occur only in our heads. Yet when neuroscientists look inside our brains to see what’s going on, they find only billions of neurons exchanging electrical impulses and releasing chemical substances.

Five years ago, in a chance conversation, Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness that undercut this interpretation. It set him off on a quest to discover more about this fascinating topic and also led him to observe his own experience with immense attention.

Out of My Head tells the gripping, highly personal, often surprisingly funny story of Parks’s quest to discover more about this fascinating topic. It frames complex metaphysical considerations and technical laboratory experiments in terms we can all understand. Above all, it invites us to see space, time, color, smell, sounds, and sensations in an entirely new way. The world will feel more real after reading it.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, Psychology

320 pages, Paperback

Published October 22, 2019

About the author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

From Mice and Men
Human consciousness: what a strange, complex thing it is. In the scientific world, consciousness is hot stuff: research, publications and conferences on this topic follow one another at a rapid pace. And it is also the subject of this book. For once this is not a real work of fiction by Parks, although it is not full-fledged nonfiction either. In some ways it is comparable to his Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing (2010), in which Parks zoomed in on his search for a treatment of a personal physical problem, to show that there are more ways to the body-mind issue than evidence-based science.

This book on consciousness offers an amalgam of Parks' tour along various scientists, especially neurologists who do experiments on babies and mice (yes, yes), along with personal experiences and reflections, and scientific and philosophical talks. It’s the variation that makes this book on a very difficult topic more or less easy to read.

On to consciousness then. Parks's own approach is the Spread Mind Theory of the Italian philosopher Riccardo Manzotti. It opposes the scientific consensus that our consciousness takes place entirely within our heads: memories, experiences, dreams..., they are all within our brain, this theory says. This internalist view seems to be supported by the vast neurological research that records which brain connections are flashing during certain human actions. Next to this, there is the (smaller) school of the enactivists: they see consciousness as an intentional action that emanates from the human being towards external (or internal) objects or phenomena, thus consciousness as a ‘reaching for’. The Spread Mind Theory is kind of similar. Manzotti first interpreted this as the mutual relationship between man/woman and object, the interaction itself being consciousness, both internal and external. But in 2015 he changed course and concluded that in this interaction ultimately the external object itself constitutes the relationship and thus consciousness: “The brain and body, in contact with the world, allow experience, or mind, or consciousness, to happen, but the experience is not located in the body or the brain. It's outside. The object is the experience.” Parks admits that this seems very strange, and he continues to struggle with it throughout the book, but at the same time, he agrees there is certainly truth to it.

By now it will be clear to the reader that this is not an easy book, and although Parks does his best, at times it can be quite hard to digest. What particularly appealed to me is his clear criticism of the reductionism of classical science. In this respect, this book is perfectly in line with Siri Hustvedt's masterpiece The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves. With Parks it is mainly the neuroscientists with their endless experiments (especially on mice) who, he feels, keep going in meaningless circles.

Parks's experiences and musings do not seem to deliver a real outcome, although in the end he seems to opt for the soft version of the Spread Mind Theory (the one from before 2015), in which consciousness is the 'meeting' between the me and an external object (in the broad sense of the word), an encounter that is always new. It's a nice compromise that I can live with. In a way this book related to what is – in my view - one of his masterpieces: the novel Dreams of Rivers and Seas (2008), which is also about perception and the fluidness and intangibility of reality. "Out of my head" is an intriguing and interesting read, but I still prefer Parks's novels!

[Geoff Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah, nice.

I must confess I haven’t yet quite grasped the spread mind theory, but there are many arguments in here that will challenge your worldview and open your mind.

I want to research this more.

Parks captures nicely many of the contradictions that the most commonly cited theories of consciousness contain, which reveal themselves when you hold them up to the light of everyday experience.

I’m not (yet:) sure his conclusion is right, but I sure enjoyed reading about it.

[Williwaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, if nothing else, a thought provoking book. It's more of a memoir than a straight book of philosophy. But Parks does grapple with dualism, neuroscience, and the ideas of Riccardo Manzotti.

It could shake you from your dogmatic slumber, but don't expect to be converted.

Above all, Parks is a great writer, so I enjoyed reading the book despite being left with a frustrating sense of ambivalence and inconclusivity.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about the book. There were things I really liked about it, for example he was great at examining his own mental experiences and writing about them. And he had a good sense of humor. And he’s interested in consciousness as I am. But he’s very interested in something called the “Spread Mind” theory by Ricardo Manzotti, which I can’t help but see as very loony and unscientific, and it kind of pervades the book.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

author explores an unusual spread mind theory of consciousness, that it is the observed object and the observer's mind
explored through a series of meetings with scientists he was contracted for, and a subsequent conference,
never felt I got a good handle on what differentiated this theory from other similar theories, while the neuroscience felt as if it was simultaneously dismissed and over technical

strange that as a fiction author, so little was mentioned on how readers are conscious of worlds in books

[Scott Lupo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative introduction to the Spread Mind theory via a stream-of-consciousness type of writing style. It surely is an interesting theory that requires some rather strange and creative thinking. Of course, all current consciousness theories require some form of outside thinking. Tim Parks basically narrows down the field to internalist, enactivist, and the spread mind theories. Within these broad categorical theories, he explains how they view experience. Specifically, where is the experience? Is it just in the brain with trillions of synapses, dendrites, and action potentials creating the experience, meaning there are no colors or smells because those are just chemical reactions created internally? Does consciousness just 'arise' out of that? Or is it the process that is the experience as enactivists have it where consciousness only exists because we enact with objects in the world and that process of what they call conation is the experience. Or is it as simple as saying the object is the experience, as spread mind says it is? The internalist view has all the glory these days, and for good reason. It certainly seems like everything is happening in the brain. Even experiments show certain parts of the brain correlate to certain actions (but which causes which?). Yet, you can't find pictures of objects in the brain or people's faces or anything for that matter except loads of chemical and electrical reactions. The spread mind explanation for dreams is fascinating and creative. Overall, a good introduction and fun read that will have you thinking deep and exploring more.

[Jeffrey Fisher]

A tricky read at times, but worth staying with it. Not sure I fully understand the spread mind theory after finishing, but then understanding any other modes of consciousness ain't any easier either.

[Ryan Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful read that was well written as a piece to keep our attention while touching upon some major concepts. I would give it 5 if it didn't seem as though Parks was outright bought on the idea of Spread Mind Theory. I'd still recommend it and it's provided quite a few additional sources that I know I'll need to get my hands on at some point.

[Graychin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The older I get, the less impressed I am by academic badges. In fact, the more advanced university degrees you have, the more likely I am to assume you’re a fool. There are plenty of exceptions, but this is not a case of degree-envy on my part; it’s a prejudice (a pre-judgment) I have formed based on experience and observation. You’re free to disagree.

Tim Parks is a British novelist, not a university professor, but his book describes, among other things, his participation in an academic conference in Heidelberg, Germany, on the question of whether science is becoming a religion. A generous honorarium is attached to the invitation, so he accepts (and brings along his 30-year-old girlfriend; Parks is over 60). His special interest is the question – and the competing theories – of consciousness.

The other conference participants, and the “philosophers” and neuroscientists Parks interviews, are a jumble. The fact that society (via tax dollars) allows for so many people to make a living in such rarified and non-practical ways is a symptom of terminal decadence, in my opinion. It’s parasitism. I can’t help but think we’d have a healthier society (healthier minds, healthier families and communities and civic institutions) if we had fewer academics and more farmers and tradesmen.

Regarding those “theories of consciousness” – I am a partisan of the commonsense Samuel Johnson I-Refute-It-Thus school, but the questions do seem to obsess a significant portion of our edu-ma-cated classes. Is conscious experience all locked away in our heads, a simple matter of chemistry and electrical activity, with little to no room for fluffy notions like free will or objective material reality? That’s the generally accepted view. “You want to know what consciousness is? Here’s a brain scan that shows you how this little corner here lights up when you see a picture of Queen Elizabeth.”

If “explanations” of that sort feel limp to you, you’re not alone. Parks quotes an objection from a conference attendee:

“’Professor Zeki,’ interrupted a certain Ron Chrisley, expert in artificial intelligence, just as the speaker was sitting down, ‘if you tell me which circuits of a computer are active when its chess program moves knight to queen’s bishop three, you haven’t really told me very much about chess, have you?’”

Parks is skeptical of the standard mind/brain identity theory too. His pet alternative – something called the Spread Mind theory – is fringe but scores points for heterodoxy. According to Spread Mind, your experience of a red wheelbarrow simply is the red wheelbarrow. Experience (most of it) takes place beyond the confines of the skull. As exemplified in the case of memories or dreams, your experience is unrestricted even by time: the past is somehow a part of your present, and your past continues to exist (a-temporally, you might say) as long as you do.

This is a simplification, of course, but Spread Mind theory is mostly considered hokum in academic circles. It’s unscientific, right? Well, as Parks does a good job of illustrating, an awful lot of science is strictly unscientific. Scientists are forever importing unargued-for and unscientific preconceptions about the nature of reality into their experiments, which inevitably influence their conclusions.

But you know how you and your wife or brother will sometimes, simultaneously, think of the same random thing at the same time with no discernable logic or stream of association to account for it? It's just chance, we’re told, and for a long time capital-S “Science” was sure there was no such thing as “action at a distance.” But then Physics went Quantum and “action at a distance” (even of light years) had to be admitted. Which is pretty spooky.

2.5 stars but I'm rounding it up to 3.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

In what appears and feels like a rambling—even jaunty—exercise, Tim Parks recounts with mindful precision how he set out in 2014-15 to get at the heart of consciousness: what it is, how it operates, why it remains/seems a mystery. Parks was given a hefty honorarium in 2014 for participating in a conference that examined the theme of “Science as the New Religion”, and he used the funds to visit with and discuss consciousness with scientists in Heidelberg, Germany. At the back of his researches was the growing sentiment that his friend, Riccardo Manzotti, held the most convincing explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness and experience, in what Manzotti termed the Spread Mind (“consciousness of the world is one and the same with the world one is conscious of”).

Parks dutifully reads all the published scholarly papers his neuroscience interviewees have written, and he’s prepared with a large repertoire of questions when he meets with them. What most immediately distresses him is how the language in these papers remains metaphorical, how while the scientists are trying to remain neutral in their efforts to conduct experiments, they have already pre-supposed various mechanisms/concepts. He is told that this sort of “sloppiness” is standard, that other neuroscientists can look past the metaphors and see that their account of experiments and procedures are objective and not directed at foreseen/intended results/conclusions. Parks is skeptical, of course, and he is particularly harsh with interpretations of mental activities that are described in terms of computer processing.

Parks also spends time reviewing older philosophers—particularly Kant, Hume, and Descartes—and he finds that their efforts cannot pin down precisely what is happening when a person experiences the world. A similar study of more contemporary philosophy also reveals to Parks their shortcomings, in particular a denial that consciousness can include dreams, hallucinations, or even ruminative thought. While the internalist philosophers locate all of consciousness to what is happening in the brain, there are the externalists that Parks feels more in tune with: these philosophers speak of embodied consciousness, how the body and the brain are together bound up in consciousness and experience. This latter view most closely resembles what his friend Manzotti had explained of the Spread Mind.

Throughout this easy-going book’s account of Parks interviews in 2014 and a subsequent visit to Heidelberg a year later for the “Science as Religion” conference, Parks is always, entertainingly exploring what it means to be conscious and to experience (things and events). What is best about these integrated digressions in his narrative is that he continues to use a layman’s language. There is never, except in the explanations of the neuroscientist’s work, any resorting to arcane terminologies, stilted re-definitions, or neologisms. What’s most appealing about Parks’ extended ruminations about consciousness is this everyman aspect about the subject. Early on, too, there is his speculation that knowing and communicating the nature of consciousness will have little effect on how people lead their lives, much as the news that the earth was spinning around the sun never changed the language we use to convey how the earth’s rotation hid the sun for half the day.

While I subscribe to an embodied notion of consciousness—that all the body and all the senses are implicated in experience, consciousness, and even memory—I remained agnostic/uncomprehending re Manzotti’s Spread Mind theory, much as I think Parks remains unsure what it might fully mean, even though he does conclude the book with a thoughtful, moving account of re-living in 2015 a moment that he and his companion shared on the Heidelberg’s Philosopher’s Path in 2014, which depicts in language as true as he can muster what Spread Mind consciousness must entail. Best yet, even when Parks is not alluding to or discussing particular scientists or philosophers, his account of his activities seem always to be broaching the essence of consciousness and experience, as when he and his companion share breakfast and he notes the way attention alerts and implants memories, and how at the same breakfast, a tussle with a tea urn becomes more fodder for his investigations.

[Lucy Cummin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably can't do this book justice. Parks has written many novels, four or five of which I've read and which were memorable. Also much non-fiction--about living and learning in Italy, about reading, about learning to meditate and other subjects (I've read those three) so obviously I am partial to Tim Parks. In this offering Parks has been asked to explore consciousness from the 'literary' perspective, e.g., I guess, as a creative person, by visiting various neuroscientists at a sciency institute based inHeidelberg. Actually it sounds . . . peculiar to me as if someone higher up felt that it would look good if someone connected the scientists with the 'creatives' -- one question posed is whether science has replaced religion (at least for some.) Is it a belief system, just a very very tricky one? But Parks goal is to use this conference/festschrift as a fulcrum for his interest in consciousness. Is it only in our heads? So, as some philosophers (and many scientists declaim) we 'store' memories and 'process experience' etcetera -- as if the brain is a computer (think about that--a relatively new metaphor but all the rage--earlier the idea was something alarmingly like a homunculus in there orchestrating everything. Or, as an Italian philosopher who fascinates Parks, is there literally no space between our experience and the world around us, that at all times what we experience is entirely dependent on where we are, what we see, touch, hear, all of it, all at once, in an endless (at least our lifetime kind of endless) continuum of experience. Manzotti calls this the Spread Mind. Unlike the romantics who personified and gave consciousness (of some kind) to literally everything, Manzotti limits this interconnection to the present and to the presence of you, the human. Ah, it is complicated and really I am not sure about all of it, Parks valiantly works to demonstrate his ideas and to show the limitations of neuroscientific experiments. He pretty well succeeds. I am sure if I had the patience to read the book from start to end again and also to discuss it at length with others I would make sense of and more or less agree with this Manzotti. It does place us 'in' and 'part of' rather than putting us in the place we have occupied in our imaginations of being 'the center' 'the only reality' etcetera. This is a modern concept really first written up by the Greeks, but earlier peoples knew they were not apart, not separate. So not a book for the faint of heart but worthwhile if you are a quester. ****

[Cal Barton]

Things I learned: scientists can’t explain anything about consciousness; scientists can’t even explain what a rainbow is (if they don’t know the position of the observer); a novelist can get paid ten thousand euros to write an article about how scientists can’t explain anything about consciousness; some guy named Riccardo is convinced that there are no images in our heads and that experience is rooted in the external object; Tim Parks has a great relationship with his much-younger wife; Tim Parks is aware of the optics of being with a much-younger woman; Tim Parks does not like how many mice are killed in the name of science; Tim Parks is charmingly jargon-resistant; the Buddhists consider the mind a “perceptive gate” like touch or taste; Tim Parks knows this about the Buddhists because he meditates on a rolled-up towel; Tim Parks thinks the brain is a “monster of connectivity”; Tim Parks thinks a poem is not the words on the page but the experience that accompanies reading the words; there is no scientific instrument that can measure irony; scientists can’t even explain how exactly liquid water becomes ice; Tim Parks thinks science is a religion.

Good book. There’s a great scene where Parks and aforementioned much-younger wife try to translate a poem without knowing German, and their sketchily translated poem becomes a kind of thesis statement for the book — it’s a cool writerly move.

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the end, Tim Parks doesn't try to tell you what consciousness is - or more specifically I guess, where it is - but he does ask and make you yourself ask a whole lot of damn good questions about it. The basic message you get by the end of this thought provoking work is no matter how confident neuroscientists and philosophers might sound when they are trying to explain what they think consciousness is, they still really have no idea. I still don't think I can believe in the spread mind theory of consciousness, but it definitely has some very interesting points. And now I feel more strongly than ever that "neurons electrically and chemically firing in the brain" does not experience automatically make. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this book is just the way it makes you question your own thoughts and beliefs about consciousness, even if you never safely land in one safe spot of believing.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world out there has everything to do with the world in here, in your head. If you didn’t know, our brain generates much of what we experience of the world around us. Or does it? Tim Parks, inspired by his friend, roboticist Riccardo Manzotti, has a different take on consciousness. Maybe consciousness really happens out there, in objects themselves; maybe consciousness is—out of our heads. The idea is richly, transformatively strange, but Parks and Manzotti have life, theory, and science to back it up. If they’re right, then even time itself is something different than we thought.

[Marcos Sorá · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine walking through the MET museum guided by a narcissistic and shallow museum guide, who can’t stop talking about his breakfast, his family, and how he can’t understand why people pay so much attention to painting (in the end, it’s just PAINT, there is no actual orange in the depiction of an orange).

That’s how reading this book felt like.

3 stars only for the parts where he describes experiments and give you the basic facts. Some good summaries there.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t understand it all, but Parks was a very enjoyable companion to have on this journey. My own ideas on consciousness are maybe more muddled, but my understanding of the landscape is much broader.

[tree · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess it was good, explored different perspectives, but I’m very frustrated by the absence of sources or references - it detracts from the author’s credibility I feel

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loses steam about halfway, but otherwise not a bad read.

[Chris Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was pretty slow to get going - the first 50-odd pages were pretty dull to be honest. Even though it got more interesting, I'd have liked it to go into more depth.

[Grayson Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hated this book ngl. As much as I wanted to like it, it was too modern and too much of an autobiography. Nothing in that book that a 13 year old girl hasn’t thought of before.

[Jenaleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book to read alongside someone and have very interesting conversations

[Nikki Henry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Donated it before I could finish it. Don't recommend, but also don't not recommend.