In 2015, novelist and critic Tim Parks was invited by the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut of Heidelberg, Germany, to contribute a chapter for a book on the subject of whether science has become a substitute for religion. While he eventually produced that essay, Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness--an at times captivating, at times bewildering inquiry into contemporary scientific thinking on the subject of human consciousness--is the much more ambitious product of that engagement.
Parks (Teach Us to Sit Still) explains that he's been fascinated with the question "whether the self, the mind, the soul, or just consciousness, is a separate thing, isolated in the head, or some ongoing collaboration between body, brain and world" for some time. That curiosity has been fueled in recent years by his friendship with Italian robotics expert Riccardo Manzotti, who posits a controversial thesis he calls the Spread Mind Theory. In Manzotti's formulation, "experience is made possible by the meeting of perceptive system and the world, but actually located at the object perceived, identical with it even; in short, experience is the same thing as the object."
As he travels the circuitous path toward a better understanding of the human mind, Parks is a good-natured, self-effacing guide, revisiting the view of consciousness advanced in the popular animated film Inside Out or describing his mental gymnastics as he grapples with a problematic hotel tea urn. He 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. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer