Kent Dunlap
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kent Dunlap’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If you did twist it too much, yes, they certainly could burst, and in extreme cases, this will happen when that neck is twisted too far.
Well, I think that has many answers. One is that certainly a neck is a place where we display a lot of our personal self-expression. And this is in the case of how we move our head or hold our head. We all know that head movement is really important in nonverbal communication. But it's also a signpost where we...
adorn ourselves in all sorts of personal ways with necklaces, with ties, with clerical collars. We identify occupations at the neck, that is blue collar and white collar workers. So yes, it's a place of great expression in all sorts of ways, both in how it moves and what it holds there.
There certainly is. And the neck has played an important role in sexual communication in many different ways. One is that the neck is very different between the sexes. That is, males have a neck that's about 50% bigger in volume than that of a female. Yet the way we're often talking about feminine beauty is a long neck.
And certainly in many, many cultures around the world, most cultures, they value a long neck in estimations of feminine beauty.
So some animals, like that you mentioned a giraffe, are extraordinarily long. Some are extraordinarily flexible like owls. Some mammals actually have a fused neck that don't allow them to move their head at all. And in all those cases, often the neck and the capacities of the neck match the lifestyle of those particular animals. A good case in point is owls. I think you've mentioned owls before.
They can twist their head more than... 360 degrees around. And they need to be able to do this because their eyes in their head are actually not mobile. And I won't go into it at length, but their eyes, as being nocturnal predators, they have to have very large eyes. And with their large eyes, they're unable to move those eyes around in their skull.
So in order to compensate for that, they have extraordinarily flexible necks that they can turn all around and see all around themselves, even though their eyes are fixed within their skull.
That's absolutely right. There are so many different vulnerabilities in there, and we've mentioned that you can choke there, you can cut an artery right there, or you can snap your spinal cord, and all those would quickly result in death. Sadly, this is also a feature of the neck that has been taken advantage of by a lot of political entities.
That is, the neck is a place where we control people politically, either by hanging them, by decapitating them with a guillotine, or by shackling them as well. Cultures in their dark past have used the neck as a place to control and oppress people.
That's right. I kind of think about the neck almost as like a frame on a portrait. So typically what you do is when you're looking at a portrait of a painting or a photograph, you will see a person's face and spend a lot of time looking at their face. But then right there below the face is this area that we can use to advertise our membership into different groups.
For example, you might be wearing a tie that indicates what your alma mater is or what branch of the service that you... serve. Or you might display features of your financial status, that is how expensive and gaudy your jewelry is there. So it's a very important place for broadcasting these emblems of status and membership.
One place that you see its use a lot, as I mentioned, is in portraiture. So you can be aware of this, actually, almost any public place you go now, because there are people snapping selfies of themselves. And you'll notice when you look at those people that they almost never look straight into the camera.
They're almost always holding their arm outstretched above them, tilting their head up and to the side. And it seems that, at least in the Western cultures, that humans really avoid this head-on view of a face. We almost always turn our head. This is not the case in all cultures and at all times.
And if you look in art museums, for example, you'll see that in Western cultures since about the Roman period, the neck is always turned in art. But if you look at other cultures and at other times, you will see that forward face-on posture.
I think it looks more inviting and appealing and softer to have our neck square on our... I mean, tilted or twisted compared to being square on our shoulders. Other places that you see that head posture being really important is in depictions of authority. So one place, for example, that you might see it is on a marine...
that is part of a marine recruiting poster, where the symbolism is supposed to be of strength. One place you see it, for example, is in the Statue of Liberty, where the Statue of Liberty is a very strong figure, and she has her head straight forward. You'll see portraits of kings and queens with their heads straight forward.
But other characters that want to exude more warmth or personality will almost always tilt their head or turn their head in some way.
I think if anyone said that we understood the neck fully, they would be a big liar or pretty ignorant, one of the two. Because yes, there's always things to learn. One feature of the neck which is very at the forefront now is this whole phenomenon of text neck. That is people having sore necks because they spend so much time with their head tilted over a device, a computer or a phone.
And so there's a lot of research going on now in terms of what you... what are the actual pathologies that go on in the neck when people bend over a device for so much time and what you can do to avoid that. Another area of research is that there are just practically infinite shapes and sizes of necks across the animal world.
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