About Face (Paperback, New Ed)

A physician's curiosity leads him to a subject oddly underexplored in its own right: the face. British neurophysiologist Cole pursues the link between our faces and our inner selves in a science-minded inquiry that is very much a natural history rather than a cultural one. But it's not strictly scientific, either: Cole's topic lies among questions just out of the confident grasp of science - the nature and relationship of mind and body, of thoughts and feelings, the definition of consciousness itself. Given that, Cole assembles persuasive speculations from his journalistic research among people who either can't perceive facial expressions or can't make them as a result of blindness, autism, disfigurement, or face-impairing Mobius syndrome, Bell's palsy, and Parkinson's disease. Despite the variety of conditions described in these uniformly heartfelt interviews, his conclusions from them are largely similar: that facial expression exists somewhere pivotal between the mental and the physical, that the face, beyond simply expressing interior states, actually affects the emotional life through its importance in relating to others. The chapters on autistic subjects - for whom the disctinctions between self and others, body and mind and emotion, are strangely ruptured - are powerfully suggestive of the complexity of the face's meaning; but relying heavily, in brief encounters, on the ad hoc personal vocabulary used by subjects to try to explain their experiences, this study remains little more than suggestive. But that's only to say that Cole has initiated an ambitious synthesis, putting the face at the center of various disciplines that touch on it - neurological, psychiatric, evolutionary (he surmises that faces function emotionally in primates' individual relationships as well as humans') that may be taken up by such specialists in response to his impressions. A genial peek - in the mirror, as it were - at the mystery of the self. (Kirkus Reviews)

What is special about the face, and what happens when neurological conditions make expression or comprehension of the face unavailable? Through a mix of science, autobiography, case studies, and speculation, Jonathan Cole shows the importance not only of facial expressions for communication among individuals but also of facial embodiment for our sense of self. He presents, in his words, "a natural history of the face and an unnatural history of those who live without it." The heart of the book lies in the experiences of people with facial losses of various kinds. The case studies are of blind, autistic, and neurologically impaired persons; the most extreme case involves Mobius syndrome, in which individuals are born with a total inability to move their facial muscles and hence to make facial expressions. Cole suggests that it is only by studying such personal narratives of loss that we can understand facial function and something of what all our faces reflect.

General

Imprint:	MIT Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Mit Press
Release date:	February 1999
First published:	1999
Authors:	Jonathan Cole
Dimensions:	234 x 168 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	237
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-262-53163-4
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Physiological & neuro-psychology
LSN:	0-262-53163-1
Barcode:	9780262531634

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