Profile: Ray Tallis

Abstract

By whatever criterion—effort devoted, work published, plaudits earned—it's hard to decide whether Ray Tallis is a doctor who also does philosophy, or a philosopher who also does medicine. No matter. Spice these core preoccupations with dashes of literary criticism, neuroscience, and poetry, and the result is an intellect that fizzes with ideas. The philosophy came first. Tallis grew up surrounded by books, and with a father whose hunger for knowledge clearly infected his son. Oxford University and St Thomas's Medical School, London, led him eventually into neurology, but geriatric medicine later captured him. When he applied for the chair in the health care of the elderly at Manchester University, Professor Leslie (now Lord) Turnberg was on the selection committee. “Before he came for interview, we saw his CV with all these non-medical interests,” Turnberg recalls. “Philosophy, poetry, radio programmes—it was quite a shock to the system.” But it helped to make the applicant an attractive one. He was duly appointed. For a man who epitomises mental creativity, Tallis has a perplexingly downbeat explanation of what it entails. Music and maths may be exceptions but, by and large, he doesn’t think creativity reflects any profound difference in the quality of an individual's consciousness: the “utterly complex, creative, ordinary human consciousness” that we all possess. “Those who stand out as creative are only 2% more so than any other human with a normal level of consciousness”, he argues. However, so beguiled are we by that extra 2% that we’re apt to overlook the shared 98% underpinning it. But what is this 2%? Simple, claims Tallis; an urge to pay close attention. “Think about creative writers. They’re always on the look out, always observing. And they have a hunger to bring everything together. A hunger to widen their sense of things. They’re always on the case.” Although Tallis's philosophical writings have ranged from science to literary criticism, there is one constant preoccupation: “The mystery of explicitness, and the fact that consciousness cannot be reduced to being part of the material world.” Of all animals, only we human beings have developed the capacity to know what we’re doing—to be explicit about our actions, our purposes, and our states of mind. The emergence of this attribute, he argues, cannot be explained in darwinian terms. And since explicitness is the essence of consciousness, this quality too, he believes, is unlikely ever to be pinned down. “I think the whole conceptual framework within which neuroscientists approach the matter of consciousness is wrong.” Although this apparently dismal conclusion irritates some brain researchers, it doesn’t much trouble Tallis himself. “Having a sense of the inexplicability of consciousness, and exploring it in all its glorious manifestations, is good enough.” Michael Grant, an academic who teaches at the University of Kent, has edited The Raymond Tallis Reader, so he is well placed to offer assurances that, despite the man's amateur status, professional philosophers take him seriously. “His philosophising is, as becomes a doctor, therapeutic. He aims to dispel fake obscurity and false profundity…He's very English in this, by which I don’t mean that he is insular or a little Englander. Anyone who writes as he does about Heidegger (let alone Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Parmenides) can hardly be described as provincial or parochial in outlook.” Talking to Ray Tallis in what is surely his natural habitat, a library, I keep returning to the nature of creativity. Although he's never written non-fictionally about it, the attribute does feature in a novel (“never published because it was so awful”) written at a time when he was working with electroencephalography. The book, Brainwaves, is about “a poor sod who gets a grant to investigate how creative and successful brains are different from ordinary brains by doing EEGs. Given that so many things are involved in creativity, like opportunity, the appropriate context, the luck that makes you want to carry on…well, none of that could be captured in a statistical parametric analysis of EEG traces.” Human creativity, he thinks, is doomed to remain as unexplained as all other manifestations of consciousness. Simpler to account for is Tallis's exceptional productivity: early rising. “He’d done a day's work in philosophy before going to the day job”, recalls Turnberg. “It's a pace that leaves me breathless.” Tallis went part time at Manchester in 2003 and, apart from advising on some research projects, hung up his stethoscope for good in March, 2006. “I can’t imagine what his output will be now he's devoting all his time to it”, Turnberg adds. “And yet he's a bon viveur. It's not as if he spends all his time hidden away producing these books. He's great company.” Indeed he is. Explicitly so.