The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head (Hardcover)

by Raymond Tallis (Author)
Key Phrases: sensory room, sonic structure, Charge Nurse Ryan, Paul Valéry, Hong Kong (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Tallis, a UK poet, novelist, philosopher and professor of geriatric medicine, here combines his talents to produce a ponderous, celebratory tour of the human head which, while thorough, avoids the other-worldly complexities of the brain. Instead, Tallis (The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being) fills his essays with a curious and personal mix of bio-mechanics, philosophy and wonder: "the head harvests sights and sounds and smells and tastes; sequesters indoor and outdoor, private and public, urban and rural air; and ingests food and drink and medicines and worse. And its outputs are as impressively varied." He examines each sense in detail, along with functions such as smiling, blushing, breathing and kissing in playfully-titled chapters ("Head Traffic: Eating, Vomiting and Smoking"). Tallis's mix of history, etymology, literature and science, along with his infectious enthusiasm ("Our ability to pick sounds out of a background of other sounds... is the equivalent of picking out all the ripples associated with one raindrop from a puddle in a downpour") leads him to many interesting points. Readers looking for a thoughtful assessment of what's right behind their noses-without all the tedious neurology-will find this an entertaining, eye-opening experience.
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From Booklist
British medical doctor Tallis considers the looks and actions of the human head—without discussing the brain. That would seem like performing trapeze without a net, yet Tallis pulls it off with panache. Notifying readers of his penchant for digression, Tallis appears to meander through the sense organs domiciled in the head, but he unfailingly brings rambles full circle to a central theme: “the great gaps that have opened up between humans and animals.” Tallis doesn’t go so far as to separate humans from the natural world, but he stresses our cultural distance from it in an effervescent writing style. Anatomy, literary quotations, philosophy, and psychology merge in Tallis’ launch from what heads do physiologically (eat, see, breathe, hear, etc.) into the social communication human culture attaches to such bodily functions, shown in the great variety of eye contact, from winking to weeping, among other kinds of facial expression. Creative and proudly humanistic, Tallis’ tour might induce readers to scrutinize their reflections as minutely as Tallis does his own. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300142226
• ISBN-13: 978-0300142228
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #440,232 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heads Up, October 18, 2008

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Where are you? Raymond Tallis wants to know. He is not asking about your physical location; a GPS unit could supply an answer to such a simple question. Where are you inside yourself? If someone kicks you in the leg, sure, the leg is part of you, and the kicker has surely kicked you, but the leg is somehow "out there", it is literally a limb and is definitely distant from the "you" who feels the kick, or the "you" who might think about it or talk about it. Where that you is, and who that you is, are the themes in _The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head_ (Yale University Press). You may well have the feeling that the real you is somewhere in your head; perhaps you got this feeling because you learned long ago how the brain within your cranium is in charge of everything. You cannot feel your brain doing this work; it is all automatic, and though the brain is full of nerve cells, it has no cells assigned to do any feeling of pain or of bustling activity. The ancients thought that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, and so its role in cognition was not always assumed. It feels to me, and it might feel to you, that my me is somewhere right behind my eyes, though if I ask where those feelings are coming from, I can't feel their origin. Tallis's serious but brightly written book has much to say about consciousness, but it starts off with a paradox: "This book about the head says little about the brain." Tallis jokes, "First, be assured the importance of the brain has not entirely escaped my attention." The brain is the biggest and most important part of the head, but Tallis spends much more time on the head's activities around the brain, the things that might make us think that the head is our headquarters.

"Selves are not cooked up, or stored, in brains," Tallis writes. "Selves require bodies as well as brains, material environments as well as bodies, and societies as well as material environments." So it is instructive to examine the head and its "outer" activities, because, Tallis explains, "the brain is absurdly over-rated", and for all its power and mystery, a brain cannot constitute a whole being's world. "I want to celebrate the mystery of the fact that we are embodied," Tallis writes, and the celebration here has to do with the myriad non-brain activities of the head. Like secretions. Can you list them all? Well, there is saliva, of course. You will, quite automatically, slurp up around 30,000 liters of saliva during your lifetime, most of which you won't think about at all. It is remarkable that we humans have taken secretion of saliva, a biological necessity, and put it under our conscious control, at least whenever we want it to be, for the purpose of insulting someone else, or to lick a stamp. Saliva has within it molecules that help fight infection, and so does ear wax. There's mucus. There's sweat, which is produced in other places of the body, of course, but sebum, a mixture of fats and dead cells from the hair follicles, is produced almost all from the head. After all these, Tallis winds up with tears, "a secretion at last with a bit of class". There is plenty here on the way humans use our heads to communicate by shaping air and making sounds, but plenty also on how heads communicate silently. Blushing is one way, as are the expressions that are hard wired into us; even congenitally blind people use the same expressions for anger, surprise, fear, and so on.

Tallis is a retired professor of medicine, which enables him to give physiological details about such head activities as kissing, yawning, or vomiting, or the skills of head-butting, or details of the worms and insects that will infest a lifeless head. He is also a poet, and his love of language is found throughout this thought-provoking book. There are many gentle puns, such as his reflections on the use of Botox: "The wrinkles return and injections have to be repeated and, eventually, the face has to face up to the fact that it is no longer beautiful; and to withstand the inattention that anticipates its ultimate effacement." With all his physiological information about the extra-cranial activities of the head, Tallis succeeds in taking the focus away from the brain, a blow against the "neuromythology" that reduces consciousness to intracranial processes only. He has no more solved the knotty problems of consciousness than the neurologically-based philosophers have, but the physical / mental puzzle is probably intractable. What he has done is raise fascinating questions by reminding us that we are wonderfully complex embodied physiological masses, part of nature but always able to use nature to step out of ourselves and observe, and always pulled back into our physical selves no matter how objective we try to be. The combination of philosophy and physiology proves to be a heady mix.