Consciousness is weighty philosophical and scientific ground, yet Parks plots a chatty, accessible path through impenetrable academic papers and conferences on his quest to understand more about being human. So chatty, in fact, he often has conversations with himself, making Parks an even more likable guide to these lofty concepts ... Out of My Head often feels like a dinner party conversation about to go over the heads of nearly everyone in the room. For all his considerable restraint, even Parks ends up deep in theory by the end – although it sounds poetic in his hands...
Thinking about consciousness can be hard and frustrating, and Parks may well have been happier if he’d spent recent years focusing instead on something like football...although one doesn’t get that impression. He is a terrific ambassador for curiosity, and greets each step in his intellectual journey with dogged insistence ... Parks’s approach of picking one horse and sticking with it has its merits. It forces you to ask why radical ideas are resisted. Yes, the spread mind theory sounds crazy but, as political matters attest, what we take for normal can sometimes be completely insane.
...an at times captivating, at times bewildering inquiry into contemporary scientific thinking on the subject of human consciousness ... As he travels the circuitous path toward a better understanding of the human mind, Parks is a good-natured, self-effacing guide ... Parks's book becomes most challenging when it asks readers to join him in the deep end of neuroscience pool, as in a 35-page chapter describing in detail an experiment involving Gad67EGFP mice and GABAergic neurons. He's clearly steeped himself in the relevant scientific literature, and has spent a good bit of time grappling with this elusive subject matter, but for those who aren't technically inclined, portions of the book like that one may prove less appealing. Out of My Headdoes more to stimulate speculation about its central question than it does to provide any definitive answers. Parks is a thoughtful layman fully committed to his task, and anyone with a similar bent will find much grist for further reflection in this provocative book.
... a ramshackle tour of Manzotti’s theory, or at least of [Parks'] attempts to understand it and explain it to other people ... is as much about what it’s like to be Tim Parks as about Manzotti’s spread mind. We learn of Parks’s abdominal pains, his sleep problems, his meditative techniques (these are related); his partner, Eleonora Gallitelli; his struggles with smartphones, tea urns, and the German language. He ambles, digresses, heads down the block for a pack of smokes, gets sidetracked in conversation, comes back hours later without the cigarettes ... His diaristic method prevents him from retroactively introducing Husserl into the earlier parts of the narrative ... There are so many misplaced modifiers that I began to wonder if Parks was doing it on purpose, and I wish Elon Musk were quoted zero times, but the flitting style’s fitting. Parks is moved to examine his own phenomenology as he tries to make the spread-mind theory match up with his experience ... Perhaps for this reason, he turns out to be adept at exposing the flummery of neuroscience.
...makes for an accessible read but ultimately confuses readers who are trying to figure out the author’s understanding of the subject. The sections on past and current philosophers’ theories, and Parks’s applying them to ordinary life are fascinating, but never culminate into a coherent theory ... The presentation of this work may appeal to some readers seeking a new approach to the elusive trail of consciousness. Yet the majority of audiences will find this structure off-putting as its style further complicates an already complex topic.
I have to say, I didn’t exactly yawn when Parks did his 'big reveal' of Manzotti’s concept of consciousness on page 79 – but I almost did ... Parks’s own fantastic journey into the human brain takes him to Heidelberg, where he interviews a trio of neuroscientists – but while his prose remains as Englishly empirical as ever, his methodology is that of phenomenology from beginning to end: a consideration of his own consciousness shorn of any assumptions about what has caused it ... At the very end of the book, Parks finds in his experience of touching an old plaque in a Heidelberg park the confirmation he seeks of Manzotti’s position ... That his own experience and the world are 'the same thing' is an insight we would have expected a little earlier from this mindfulness fanatic...
In places, this Oliver Sacks-like book had me drifting into unconsciousness. The brain accounts for just two per cent of our body weight yet it burns up a fifth of the calories we eat. Such baffling complexity! ... Parks, who is best-known for his Toujours Provence-like memoirs of life in Italy, succeeds admirably in bringing difficult ideas down a level ... Parks writes well enough to appeal to the layman and the mind boffin alike. Out of My Head is pleasurably nutty, self-regarding and at times quite hilarious. At the end of it all, however, we are left with no clearer idea of how consciousness might work. No matter — it’s in the nature of grey matter to baffle.
Parks recounts with generous and eager openness his conversations with leading philosophers and neuroscientists from whom he gleaned three positions about consciousness ... A lucid exploration of thinking, perceiving, and being human.
