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.
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