Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness - Couverture souple

"With wit, humanity and insight... [Parks] tackles a question that the greatest philosophical and scientific minds have struggled with for centuries: what is consciousness?... Parks is an entertaining companion throughout" (Mail on Sunday)

"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. He’s not afraid to question some of Manzotti’s more ridiculous ideas, and muses on everything from the meaning of a midlife crisis to the much-loved Pixar film Inside Out, in which five cartoon emotions battle for control of the heroine’s psyche... A thoughtful quest to understand consciousness." (Observer)

"Parks, who is best-known for his Toujours Provence-like memoirs of life in Italy, succeeds admirably in bringing difficult ideas down a level. Eleanora Gallitelli, his Italian partner, who accompanies him to a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg for research purposes, also helps. Gallitelli recently told me that she is deaf in one ear. The story of her sudden irreparable deafness ― how her brain began to develop a mind of its own, playing tricks with spatial awareness and balance ― is quite brilliantly told here. 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." (Evening Standard)

"[A] fantastic journey into the human brain...Parks makes an excellent point about what he calls the "internalist" position (that our picture of reality is just that: a subjective one, concocted by our brains), which is that it flatters our sense of our own importance, making of us creators of our own effectively unique worlds." (Will Self New Statesman)

"By describing his efforts to understand the phenomenon of consciousness in the form of a candid and entertaining journal-cum-memoir, Tim Parks has made a difficult subject interesting and accessible. He is an amateur in this crowded field but he presents professional neuroscientists with some challenging questions." (David Lodge)

Bestselling author Tim Parks embarks on an entertaining quest to understand the theories of consciousness and what it means to think and feel.

Can computers be conscious?
Is our universe real of a simulation?
Is the mind a unique quality of human beings?

As technological breakthroughs in AI continue to advance, topics like this have become part of the daily news cycle. But what does it all mean and what is at stake for the human race?

When Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness he set off on a quest to discover more about this fascinating topic and also let him to observe his own experience with immense attention.

Out of My Head tells the gripping, highly personal, often surprisingly funny, story of a paradigm shift. It frames complex metaphysical considerations and technical laboratory experiments in terms we can all understand. Above all, it invites us to see space, time, colour and smell, sounds and sensations in an entirely new way. The world will feel more real after reading it.