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.
... 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.
