杏吧原创

has thought long, deeply and in a practical way about life, death and consciousness: he is a recently retired professor of geriatric medicine specialising in clinical neuroscience. He is also a philosopher and author of published fiction and poetry. His writings on the mind and body display an intellectual breadth and distinctive style bordering on that of a polymath.

In his latest book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space, Tallis has decided to explore the head. Not the brain, but the head; this is not another book about consciousness, and only the final chapter deals with it explicitly. Neuroscience and brain scans are conspicuously absent. Its subject is the head as a whole, and the way that heads relate to selves.

In fact, Tallis is exasperated by brain worship and the excessive claim that consciousness emerges exclusively from the firing of neurons. 鈥淪elves require bodies as well as brains, material environments as well as bodies, and societies as well as material environments,鈥� Tallis says in a fighting foreword. 鈥淭hat is why, despite the hype, we won鈥檛 find in the brain an explanation of ourselves.鈥�

The book gets the reader to think afresh about everyday experiences such as staring in the mirror, vision, breathing, speaking, hearing, face recognition, laughter, tickling, yawning, sweating, eating, spitting, smoking, vomiting, sleeping, ageing, sex and death. The pages burst with an entertaining mixture of intriguing facts and thought-provoking observations.

On eating, for example, Tallis disagrees with writers such as Richard Dawkins, who treat hunger as nothing more than a biological drive. We must eat to survive, but there is a social dimension to stuffing our faces that Darwinians tend to minimise. The contrast between the raw and the cooked is the difference between nature and culture, as structural anthropologist Claude L茅vi-Strauss pointed out. Cultural culinary codes can be elaborate and confusing to outsiders.

On blushing, Tallis wonders why we do it, since it clearly draws attention to our vulnerability. He describes an attempted scientific study of the blush in young females. The aim was to prompt blushes under controlled conditions by exposing the subjects to suggestive material. The experiment failed totally, yet when the researcher thanked the women for participating, they apologised for their uncooperative cheeks and blushed scarlet.

And on thinking, Tallis muses: 鈥淓arwax is in my head. Mucus is in my head. My brain is in my head. But are my thoughts in my head?鈥� There follows an accessible disquisition, influenced by the philosopher , on whether thought and meaning are the kinds of things that occupy space. 鈥淲hen, as I did from time to time, I applied a stethoscope to a patient鈥檚 skull, I sometimes heard the bruit of the angioma I was listening for but never even the slightest rumour of the thoughts that I knew were ceaselessly passing through his mind,鈥� Tallis writes.

鈥淓arwax is in my head. My brain is in my head. But are my thoughts in my head?鈥�

While reading the book, one cannot help wishing that the digressions and detours were shorter. Without them, Tallis would not be Tallis, but the book would nevertheless have benefited from sympathetic, firm editing. It will not do to plead, as he does, that all worthwhile journeys involve frequently getting lost.

Does The Kingdom of Infinite Space shed new light on the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience (the infamous 鈥渉ard problem鈥� of consciousness which neuroanatomist David Bainbridge recently dismissed as a 鈥渄eceitful spectre鈥� in )? Not really. But it enjoyably persuaded me that we need to attend more to our heads than to our brains if we are to explain our selves to ourselves.

The Human Brain 鈥� With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.