So we have three speakers today and Professor Puckett is going to speak first.
I will give you a quick introduction.
So Andrew Parker is currently a professor of physiology and a fellow of St John's College at the University of Oxford.
His research covers several aspects of spatial vision and neuronal mechanisms of perceptual decisions.
He presently is working on neurophysiology and neuro imaging of stereoscopic vision.
He's held the leadership of senior research associate and a Wolfson Merit Award from the Society.
He's been invited scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
In his in his spare time, can I say that he's founded the first English State School,
offering three fully bilingual streams, teaching the European schools curriculum.
And today he's going to talk about how brain activity is altered by trusting the advice of experts.
And he's going to explore the extent to which we can trust the images of neural activity delivered to us by not only brain scans.
So thank you and thank you so much. And it's a great pleasure to be here.
And thank you for coming out on a day like this when we should probably all be outside.
Now, the first thing is that I'm still learning how to.
So that one. Yeah. Okay. So as Simon said, this is actually what I do in this in my spare time.
And the real topical reason for just showing you this very quickly is it's being published today.
So I'm quite pleased with it. And as a special issue of the journal, so mostly I'm interested in visioning in our three dimensional world.
I work on mechanisms of stereoscopic vision. If you've been to the 3-D movies and put the glasses on and you see things coming out of the screen,
I'm mostly interested in what the brain does under those circumstances and why
that fails in a number of individuals and that little creatures atmosphere.
It's actually a nocturnal animal, as you can tell, but it it hangs around in the bushes and pounces on things that it wants to eat.
And I'm good to talk about trust in experts.
And as part of this, I'm going to talk about a study that we did actually turns out now a few years ago.
But it seems to be part of a continuing discussion that I've been having with people in the arts and humanities.
And I think I mean, it's it's of an unusual nature,
whether it actually tells us something is part of the process that I'm going through in coming to seminars and events of this kind.
If we think about experts and trust and relate that to authenticity,
the route into this particular framework that I'm talking about is that often we do
actually rely on the opinions of others in deciding whether or not something is authentic.
And we carry around that implicit knowledge, if you like, a form of unconscious memory as we go about our daily life,
often told actually questioning and uprooting everything, even as a scientist.
I'm not going back to the empirical evidence that proves X or Y.
I'm often just accepting that that has been done.
And this element of trust is quite interesting from a the point of view of a cognitive neuroscientist,
because it has both the element of rational thinking and the element of emotion about it.
The two seem to come together when we actually trust something.
It's not. It's neither one or the other. It's a it's something of both of them.
And therefore, it's a very interesting area to explore. Now I'm going to begin with what are these people doing here?
And as many of you will know, this is the room in the loop where the Mona Lisa is is hung.
And there she is. And all these people are in the room.
To see the Mona Lisa. Actually, lots of nice paintings around here, but they're all looking in that direction.
And if you rate it as an aesthetic experience, it's actually not terrific.
In fact, many of them are doing it in a mediated form anyway.
They might as well be looking at the Internet for what they're going to take home from this.
But nonetheless, they're powerfully drawn to this room from the point of view of a biologist.
There's lots of people there. That's interesting. They spent quite a lot of resources to get there.
Resources they could have spent on other things if they were more important or significant.
And interestingly, and if you like socio biologically, it's something we drive our children to.
You must come and see the Mona Lisa. So there's something kind of vertical and cultural about that.
So all of those things get drawn together. And as a biologist, I find those very interesting.
Now. What is actually driving that? Well, it's the fact that this is the real thing and that how do we know it's the real thing?
Well, there's a little plaque on the wall that's telling us that that is the real Mona Lisa and not a fake.
And no doubt, there's lots of conspiracy theories around.
If you went on the Internet, who would say, well, it's not really the Mona Lisa.
That's, you know, a fake. They don't put the real Mona Lisa in the gallery and so on and so forth.
But everybody is drawn there by the fact that this is the real thing.
And that's the element that I wanted to talk about in in this this afternoon.
Now, how do we know that that plaque is telling the truth?
Well, lots of experts have gone into this. They've looked at provenance and so on and so forth.
And I picked up a quote from the EU referendum debate.
Actually just last week Michael Gove said, We've had enough of experts.
We don't want anymore experts. People have had enough of that.
And that's a real challenge to people like us.
Because we are supposed to be gathering together expertise and at least evaluating things and passing that out as an opinion of you,
which we hope other people will be convinced with. And we spend quite a lot of time investigating and thinking about.
So actually, if you begin to distrust experts, quite a lot of the framework that we work in begins to crumble.
And we need to, I think, understand a little bit about those processes.
So. I contrast that with a view which has been around about what we should do with neuroscience and looking at artwork.
And this was our starting point.
So I'm going to make it my starting point today because there's been a trend to use neuroscience to look at certain methodological issues.
For example, neuroscientists have gone off and searched for correlates of aesthetic quality.
I'm presuming that's a perfectly clear concept that can actually be now just boxed and studied and looked at.
And the problem has been, as I said there, often the art historians, connoisseurs,
and they're not particularly interested in what neuroscientists think about aesthetics.
They've got a pretty well well worked out framework. And after all, they've been thinking about these for a very long time.
So it's a little bit presumptuous for a neuroscientist to come in and sort of say, well, you know, I know it's this part of the brain.
Just as an example of how this can go seriously wrong, as is this rather lovely example from the 19th century.
This is a plaster copy of the Apollo Belvedere, self-evidently a an item of classical beauty.
It's actually the one from the museum in Göttingen.
And these lines here. Were placed there by the students of Felix Klein.
Felix Klein, the Klein, the mathematician Klein of the Klein bottle.
He put them there because they represent certain geometric features on the surface.
And the belief was that by probing those geometric features and their distribution across the surface,
this would reveal the true aesthetics underlying this.
This would be a revelation. Now, of course, that seems extremely naive to us now that you could actually just step right in there.
Obviously, the mathematics of form and beauty. Bang!
There it is. But that was one way of thinking.
It just shows how far wrong we can be with our own presumptions that we bring into these discussions.
So rather than doing that, we decided and I'll tell you who we are in a minute.
We decided that we would think about authenticity,
because actually that's something that art historians and connoisseurs actually do think is significant.
It's presumes to add to the aesthetic experience seeing the real Anjelica Rafael, Leonardo and so on is thought to be very important.
It's also fought over and I'll show you the example from Rembrandt.
And of course, ultimately, at least in the in the art world, it signifies a high economic value.
So these people are here. They're there because this is, you know, the priceless Mona Lisa and because of that little label on the wall.
And we tried to take that into an empirical experiment, A,
in which we could begin to study what is happening in the brain when people are given
instructions about whether or not a work is authentic or presumed to be a copy.
And this was really driven by Ming Huang who came to Oxford on a Fulbright, and she wanted to do something about art.
So she got in touch with Martin Kemp and we'd had some discussions previously.
She got in touch with my colleague Holly Bridge,
and the four of us got together and hammered out a proposal that would keep Meg Fay happy with this ambition of bringing together
art and neuroscience and would keep us happy that we were actually lending our names to something that might take us somewhere.
Now, the key into that Martin brought into this is there are a lot of Rembrandts and we know the genre.
I mean, you know, if we show people a picture and say, oh, yeah, that's a Rembrandt,
or at least I think it's a Rembrandt, the authenticity is actually actually not so well known.
And actually, quite recently, our scholars have spent quite a lot of time going through the authenticity for this particular set of portraits.
So you're going to be talking about and there've been some surprising findings,
one, Rembrandt portraits, which were previously thought to be absolutely genuine.
Rembrandt people are not quite so sure about now. And there are others which we can actually get much better evidence.
And there's been a whole program in the Netherlands set up on the on the Rembrandt project.
So what we took were 50 images taken actually from the Rembrandt Project's database.
25 of these are actually genuinely now by that project attributed to Rembrandt himself.
And another 25 are in the style of Rembrandt by someone else.
So that's how baseline, if you like reality check that we're going to use that scholarship to say some of these are authentic,
some of these are not authentic. I'm going to call them copies without meaning that they're necessarily forgeries.
And this is one of them. This is the authentic one.
It's always the one on the right here. And I'm just showing you pictures of the kinds of images that we used for this.
Again, it's the lady on the right.
Now, actually, when we got to present these, we put our subjects in a brain scanner and we showed them images of these on a single computer screen.
So they saw one image at a time. It might have been one of the genuine ones.
It might have been one of the ones I'm going to call copies. And.
We took 14 participants. We gave them a screening questionnaire.
We wanted them to be amateur viewers. We wanted them to know a bit about Rembrandt, but we wanted to weed out any people who were real experts.
We didn't want, you know, any dphil students from art history because expertises will come onto that in a bit.
But expertise is quite particular when you really get into it.
And what we required, they wanted to we required them to look at Rembrandt,
a brief bio of him, and then a brief explanation about fakes, copies, authenticity.
And that was something that Martin prepared and we worked on.
And we divided our participants into two groups, seven.
And each and all images were seen by each group so that all of them saw those 50 images, but actually they were under different instructions.
So four out of that 50, remember, we've got 25 that are genuine and 25 that are copies.
Well, in some of the group, then some of the copies were actually labelled as authentic.
And some of the authentic ones are labelled as authentic.
And then of the copies, some of them are labelled those authentic and some of them are labelled as copies.
So we we had all four combinations within one group, but critically, no person in a single group saw the same image twice.
We thought that was very, very important because people have such good memory for having seen a portrait recently.
Then to show it again with a different label would be pretty meaningless.
So we've got this crossover design whereby we've got seven participants who've seen all the 50 images under one attribution.
And the other seven participants seen the images under the directly opposite attribution.
Now just a little bit of science about what we're going to do.
We're going to measure their brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging.
I'll say a little bit more about that towards the end. But we are in this map here of size of things.
So that's one millimetre ten millimetres, 100 millimetres, 1000 millimetres.
And this is the kind of size that we've talking about of the order of the brain up here and down to about one millimetre resolution down there,
if you're lucky. And it's got a time resolution of about well, in our hands about five or 6 seconds.
So it takes a little while to measure these responses.
They're actually blood flow responses we're going to look at. But they are related to neural activity.
And here is in detail what we did. We had our two groups here.
Group one. Group two. Here they are looking at the same portrayed in group one.
There we hear an auditory signal instruction that this is authentic.
So the people in group one, when they see this portrait, they will be told it's authentic.
In Group two, same portrait, but they will have been told that it's a copy.
And so it goes on for all the 50 and the group with different attributions for Group one and Group two.
And we also included actually here a few just scrambled pictures.
They've just been scrambled. So you can't see any form in them, but they have all the colour content and so on of, of pictures.
So first thing we looked at is could we actually pick out the genuinely authentic ones
and the genuine copies simply based on measuring what was going on inside the head?
That would be fantastic because we have a real feel there with the art dealers then, because, you know, we could really win a lot.
We couldn't do it. I'm afraid we are still poor, academic, so on that.
So the authentic and the copy Rembrandts creating pretty much the same basic brain activations in relation to the visual content.
However, when we do instruction, a copy instruction versus an authentic instruction for the same picture and we compare,
you know, activation when we call it a copy compared with activation,
when we call it authentic,
then the red areas here on the brain are ones that light up by this technique when they've received the instruction that it's a copy.
And these are sad statistics.
So the standard deviations, so these are quite significant activations in different parts of the brain.
And similarly, there's one significant spot here, blue,
which is actually more activated when you receive the instruction that it's authentic as opposed to whether it's a copy.
And I'm going to begin with that the the interpretation of that one, because that's kind of interesting.
This area, the orbitofrontal cortex. It was first identified as being associated with a primary reward.
If you have a nice tasting drink or a sweet food or something, then it lights up.
It's also actually interestingly excited by a win in a gambling task.
If you put someone in the brain scanner and measure their brain responses as you set them a gambling task.
And orbitofrontal cortex lights up with a win. So.
It's telling us that actually artwork as signed as authentic a signed is
authentic actually by that measure of activation seems to have a higher value,
high net value. It it releases those reward mechanisms in the brain.
Actually the copy results are much more interesting if we just get back to them first.
There's a lot more activations and as I'm going to show you, there's a complexity to them.
Copy introduces quite a lot more activation in different areas.
And when we asked our participants after they come out of the scanner, well, well, you know what was going on?
They said, well, we were puzzling a lot more.
We were looking at these and we were looking at saying to ourselves, well, how do they you know, what made that a fake?
And immediately there's this engagement with this issue about what is it about this picture that is a fake?
Here is another part of the complexity which I'll take you through.
We saw that there was some activity right up in the front of the brain, right in the frontal cortex here.
And what we plot the degree of activity in the frontal cortex.
And the degree of activity in the visual part of the brain at the back, the occipital cortex, when we have when we tell them that it's authentic,
there's really not much relationship between the activity in the visual cortex and the activity in the frontal cortex.
However, when we tell them it was a copy, there's quite a lot of co activation.
That is to say when frontal cortex activation goes high, so does occipital cortex activation.
And we can actually look at those. These are the visual areas here, the back of the brain, which are interacting with a frontal polar cortex.
Now that is consistent with a view that the as it were, the thinking reasoning part of the brain,
which is primarily is the frontal cortex and is the part that is greatly expanded in us compared with other animals.
That is the one which is actually communicating with the visual cortex and contributing to
that extra activity that we see when we tell them that it's this puzzle puzzling copy item.
Now, we don't know the direction of the interaction. In truth, from this, it's just a correlation.
When one goes up, the other goes up. We don't know what formally what's driving it, but that's again, a very interesting set of observations.
So authenticity. Sure enough, it's just one element of the aesthetic experience, but it's a significant one.
No single brain area involved. We've identified at least three and we in particular we changed the interactions between brain areas when
we tell people it's a copy and if you like and this is what Martin Kemp immediately left to a royal,
this supports the arts scholars view. I don't think there's some justification for this.
Aesthetic judgements are multifaceted and multidimensional, and even in this limited paradigm of just looking at authenticity,
it's brain where brain areas working together that count not a single sight.
That is the, as it were, the seat of the soul and the soul's judgement about this.
I just wanted to just push this a little bit. Conscious that I shouldn't really take more than a few more minutes, but.
Just wanted to talk about these activations because these are images in themselves
and I think we need to reflect on what those images are actually telling us.
I mentioned previously that these are activations due to blood flow through
the brain and this is actually the activation just due to the finger tapping.
So if you just do this. All this.
If you do this, the green bit on the left will light up. And if you do that, the reddish bit on the on the left.
So we're looking at the localisation or the most active bits due to that very, very simple task here.
And we're looking at a three dimensional space and these are then projected out into these different projections of the brain activity.
Let me remind you that we're here in this part of the space.
Uh, this is one second 4 seconds of activity.
It's blood flow. As I tell my students in the lectures, if you cross the road on the basis of this, you'll be dead.
It's far too slow. The real stuff in terms of motor activity is happening down here in terms of what the neurones are actually doing.
So that's that's one way in which this is quite deceptive.
He's probably fine for what we're doing because people tend to spend a good while looking at pictures anyway.
But there are different parts of this space which are being completely unexplored.
When you look with functional brain imaging, that's that's one message I want to take home.
The second one is that in general, you're looking at slices of brain activity and you can sometimes see a great deal of activity.
So if you have a pattern of brain activity like this, there's a lot of data to look at over many, many parts of the brain.
And you don't have a single site of activation and you can hold into this kind of thing and concentrate on that.
But actually, you've excluded some of these other interesting things that are happening.
And finally, this is the very simple diagram that's tongue in cheek of the relationship.
Between activation of a nerve cell and activation of blood flow.
So we've got here the nervous system. And the nervous system is protected by a blood brain barrier.
And blood flows through here through artillery arterials into capillaries.
What we actually measure with our MRI machine is happening out here.
What's actually doing the work is a cell like this in here, which is a nerve cell.
And there's a little bit in between with multiple different pathways which cause the link between this activation,
which we think is the the thinking part of the brain and this activation here.
We don't really think that our blood, although that's what we're actually measuring.
And equally, when we look at patches of the brain, we have to remember the connectivity that the brain has internally.
And these are some of the connections from the brain stem here.
The two hemispheres joined. They are quite different than simply those slices of tissue that you looked at earlier.
So there are multiple different points into this.
So I'm going to finish with the following. And some of you may know what this is a very recent project.
Google had a project to extract the essence of Rembrandt,
and they gave their Google deep learning system lots of Rembrandt portraits and then said, Make me a new wolf.
And this is what it came up with. They didn't just do that.
They actually put it through a 3D printer. So they get the surface variation across of the brush strokes and so on and so forth.
So they've really done a lot of scanning and a lot of analysis. And this was the the what the the lead project lead said about this.
I wish it was that good. And it isn't. And he said, I think the expert I see is that this isn't a real Rembrandt.
And then they said something really interesting, which I think will be worth talking about.
And it's got to do with the state of technology, wherein is the amount of time we have for the process as though that what the end of the discussion.
And I think it's probably just the beginning. So I think I will stop there and we can have further discussion.
Well, thank you very much, Adam.
So I might now move straight on to our second speaker, who's Dr. Hamish Raison is an arch researcher, obviously, such as our educator and performer.
She lectures in the digital arts multimedia design and is contributing research Associate Vice Trends
Technology Research at the Marie Curie funded NOVA Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Tennessee.
She's trained, solution focussed team therapist.
Her current practice research project explores the use of hypnosis and guided visualisation within contemporary
art practice and the construction of these practices within a wider historical and cultural context.
And today she's going to give us a talk and titled I had a slightly different kind of exhibit.
At one point it was called Nail Biting. Time is about a dissertation versus just like some.
So just to introduce myself and what I do a little bit more,
I'm predominantly an artist researcher and I've been making work for the last couple of
years that seeks to explore the idea of using the imagination as a medium for arts practice.
I'll explain what some of the work that I've been making that does that actually entails.
During my talk I'm going to read, so hopefully try and stay conscious.
Just I don't go for a tangent because everything that I want to talk about is so exciting.
So, okay. In 2004, Bruno Latour suggested the very success of critical approaches to knowledge construction,
such as those practised in the sociology of science,
have resulted in a generalised and widespread scepticism about facts, but now pervades popular as well as academic culture.
And I think Michael Gove's point supports this.
He notes that his next door neighbour in his village in France thinks that
he is naive for believing that the twin towers were destroyed by terrorists.
Let was also worried about the way in which the climate change debate is being sidelined or interfered with by people who say,
Well, we can't take any facts and they use the social arguments from sociology of science to kind of undermined,
undermine the idea that there's a closed book on whether or not human based climate change is a real problem and solving ourselves.
Collection of essays believed in imaginings. The narrative construction of reality.
Psychologists Call Sheep discusses the problem of authenticity in the context of contemporary life.
The problem of authenticity is of high importance.
If beliefs about the world and about ourselves are derived from some remote source, as most of our beliefs are.
We do not, in general speak with God or Jesus, nor even have converse with Freud.
Rather, virtually all of our contact with the Earth sources in our lives is mediated by replicas copies of materials.
At the same time as our access to an authentic world of facts is called into question.
It's nothing new for knowledge to seem equally fragile. We know that our perception is constructed, that we are easily biased, prone to false memory,
and with the loss of God's guarantee that we could at least be the first object that we can believe.
The first object that we think Cartesian scepticism has left us equally bereft of facts when examining the world through our own senses.
So what I'll talk about today are some attempts to get to some other sources,
the way in which people wilfully interpret certain aspects of their mental experience
in order to give their own imaginative worlds a sense of authority and authenticity.
I'm interested in the way that people modulate their experience and the cultural ideas and behaviours that allow them to do so.
And this is a complex matter. And how on a mass scale use 2012 essay learning spirit possession.
They point out the need for an ethnographic for ethnographic accounts of possession to pay attention to what happens prior to possession.
The difficulty with generating a full ethnographic account is partly an issue, they say,
because possession involves a diffuse learning dispersed in various aspects of human existence.
The process of learning processes of learning are in many respects obscure the possessed and not supposed to learn anything.
Instead, they come to experience possession as something alien to their own will.
A Largely out of control knowledge of spirit possession is therefore implicit and nonverbal.
An access by a kind of diffuse learning anthropologist may only build a satisfactory,
satisfying account of it if they take into account the everyday actions and interactions that communicate complex,
symbolic and embodied realities of possession or in the case of institutionalised executive and accepted possession,
the anthropologist must gain privileges access to the codes in which formal, formal training takes place.
They point out that understanding possession requires an account of cognition that
recognises that it can allow humans to creatively develop as particular kinds of persons.
That cognition should be considered constructive and generative.
Like all like all social processes. Learning possession is an open ended process,
and expertise is not just about matching cultural expectations with bodily states and perceptual skills, but also learning to play up with them.
So today I'm going to talk about some of the things that people say to themselves and each other as part of a project to voluntarily change
how they perceive and more specifically where they believe that those perceptions are coming from an apparent quest for authentic sources.
Along the way, we will see some of how lawyers diffuse learning, which takes a whole range of forms,
expectancy and demand characteristics, visual culture and popular imaginaries,
implicit memories for embodied experience,
and also the narrative ization of things of experiences to fit cultural ideas as well as and perhaps crucial.
From my perspective, this creative impulse noted by Halloween and the miscue,
I'm going to focus on two examples of the cultural mediation of spontaneous imagination
and the way in which effortless or spontaneous experience is sought out and made.
Use of these practices have similar similar similarities with the executive or sought out spirit
possession as they involve an intentional shifting of agency to external or internal other causes.
I want to talk about the work that goes into and the methods by which these effects are arrived at.
The reason being that I'm an artist who seeks to understand how the imagination can be used as a material for arts practice.
So I'm going to show you quickly, let me show you my Web page.
So there's four pieces of work here that I made last year.
And I'm basically what I've been trying to think about is the idea of the imagination as a thing and the thing a thing in its most basic to sense,
this person is at its most basic as a kind of material thing that you can do stuff with.
What do we you know, if we think about imagination, if it's a kind of clay or something like, well,
how does that I find that useful to orient me as somebody who might want to try and do something to change,
something to to produce some kind of effect within.
The second thing is, comes actually from the paper I mentioned by Bruno Latour, where he talks about and also Ian Hodder, what his work entanglements,
where he talks about the idea of things as being coalescence of immaterial
and material concerns that cross over a number of cultural and material and,
and embodied and psychological and biological and physiological boundaries.
So that's my two. So it's a number of pieces of my take me on a trip to Cyprus and you could win a dream holiday used to.
I basically told people I made them agree with me that they would describe a dream
holiday to Cyprus in return for the opportunity to win a dream holiday to Cyprus.
What I did was I actually gave them a lottery scratchcard that allowed them to win up to £10,000.
But in order to get that opportunity, they had to describe to me in great detail what that holiday would be like.
And I was interested simply I live on a street in Plymouth that has lots of palm trees on it.
You know, I'm close to the English Riviera and lots of scratch cards in the gutter blowing in the wind.
And there was something about this kind of idea of the scratchcard as a kind of fun,
a door to a fantastical place or the door to an opportunity that doesn't that
might not exist as a kind of engine for dreaming or a portal of some kind.
So I kind of wanted to explore that. The reason that I asked people about Cyprus was because I was going to do a residency there.
So I sort of find out a bit about what people thought about it before I went.
And scratchcards are very popular there, funnily enough. So that's the first place a piece I made, and then I did a number of other pieces.
I will buy your dreams.
I offered to buy people's dreams from them for health money, which is, I think China and Chinese culture is as an offering to your ancestors.
So it looks like real money. It has very high denominations. It's very beautiful.
And I got people to relate dreams to me and and paid for them.
There's a stock exchange and dreams of different types. I set the prices because I'm the only person trading in them at the moment.
I have sold some of the dreams on as well.
This place, Nicosia, Oasis, Old City Tarot, was a set of tarot cards that I drew while in Nicosia last year.
I was kind of interested in the fact that lots of people, lots of visitors to Cyprus, there's a lot of artwork by visitors to Cyprus.
And in fact there's one of the galleries there has an exhibition, had an exhibition of sketches of Cyprus, visions of Cyprus by businesses.
And so I decided to go around looking for things that seem symbolic and sketch them.
And then somehow I ended up doing a tower readings for people with them.
But because I didn't know what these things meant, because it wasn't, I didn't know this place.
So I got people to tell me what they thought the cards meant when they got the cards.
So I kind of crowdsourced the symbolic meaning of the statues.
Some really interesting things came up. The the frappe card represents procrastination because people go out and drink it in the sun.
But actually, I found out that an employee of Nestlé at a trade show didn't have any hot water one day,
so he shook the Nestlé coffee over ice and discovered this new drink.
So. So it means procrastination. But don't don't stop.
Try and find a way through. So they will have these nice kind of meetings and that partly about Cypriot culture.
Finally, I've already gone off on a tangent.
Finally, I made this piece called Nova Santos, The Island of New Science and Nova Scientist uses a guided dreaming protocol,
which I'll talk about a bit more in order to get people to visit in their imaginations and an island that doesn't exist.
There's more backstory to this, but that's the key thing in this work for the moment.
So what then? So I also trained as a.
So in the same time, I was thinking about using hypnosis to make art work.
And my first idea regarding this was, wait, why?
Why make anything when I can just hypnotise someone to think that I've made the artwork and that will save you time and energy.
And then the second question is, is this a real thing? Can I actually do this?
What can you do with it? And that was kind of one of my underlying research questions is what can you do with it?
And so all of the work I've shown you hasn't used is you use one technique in Nova Santos.
That is the kind of thing that you come across in and in hypnotherapy.
So I'm going to talk about that. But I did have my reasons for not explicitly using it and the awesome artists who do.
But I'll talk about that another time. So within any arts practice, hypnotism represents opportunities and problems.
It confers authority on the practitioner, but raises endless accompanying spectres,
not to mention legal medical issues regarding what it is understood to be and what is it is understood to do.
Hypnotism is a complex and evolving cultural practice made up of making it made up of various different activities.
Visualisation. Perceptual tricks. Time lying down with your eyes.
Shots and these things more or less hang together.
So it's a thing in Bruner literal sense as well, a group of concerns crossing disciplinary and ontological boundaries.
The contemporary view is that at its centre, hypnotism is about imagination.
Kersh set out to find it as a procedure during which changes in sensations, perceptions,
thoughts, feelings or behaviour of suggested help guards review of induction procedures.
That's the ritual that you perform in order to put someone into hypnosis so that they can take a huge range of forms.
Anything from placebo tablets, injections of water, suggestions of sleep, suggestions, feel excited, anything.
And they argue that there's very little that defines the form of the actual hypnotic experience,
apart from engagement with imaginative suggestion, acting as if and the resulting changes in physiological and mental states that accompany it.
However, what informs the imagination of the hypnosis hypnotic?
In the 1950s, psychologist Martin Owen. Owen coined the term demand characteristics which characterise the broad and implicit expectations
hold held by a subject about what was expected of them in the context of a psychological experiment.
And he saw these as potentially confounding expectations or argued that the psychological he was also doing research and hypnosis.
Research, psychological laboratory could be seen as a hypnotic context in which test subjects were
highly suggestible clients and apparently behaved in a fashion that they would not otherwise.
I've recently read someone questioning just how trustworthy his work was,
so I don't know how good his claims were actually on the subject of authenticity and trust.
So one demand characteristic that seems to seems to forever dogged hypnotism is the association with loss of volition.
And and hypnotism is often used to imagine agency differently.
So I have an example here. Close this.
Oh. So this is the first training that I did was in stage hypnosis with Jonathan Chase, who's the archetypal stage hypnotist.
I think you'll agree. Don't look in his eyes. So.
So here we have some examples of discrepancies of the Internet in YouTube, but showing people demonstrating arm,
arm, cattle, APC, which is a form of it's understood to be a motor movement.
So when you think about making a certain movement, you often unconsciously move in that manner.
And so this is one of the things that still used quite a lot by hypnotherapist and stage hypnotists.
Erving Kersh has argued that this may not be as remarkable a phenomenon as it looks because people often act without being aware of their volition,
simply by paying attention to our own movements in a way that can allow in a certain way, can allow us to attributes the source of our own behaviour.
So we think that the hypnotist is telling us to do something or the imagined poorly is pulling our arms to the sky or the imagined balloon,
all these different things that we imagine. So we can pretend that we're under control, someone else's control.
So looking, but looking at the visual culture and gestures associated with hypnosis and mesmerism,
we can quickly assemble a collage that demonstrates a pervasive and embodied understanding of influence and control and its historical representation.
So some of these are images of hypnosis.
There's actually an exorcism here. I think this is an engraving.
I think this is meant to be mesmerising. One of my senses, I think.
So the whole load and I actually I think there's lots of different things that we can draw, we can see happening throughout these images.
I mean, I have picked them partly because they demonstrate certain activities, but we have the hands and pulling and magnetism moving from the hands.
We have this gesture very much the arms raised over another person,
the exerting of power that comes all the way through for the church from mesmerism all the way up to the present day.
I guess if I kind of do this, you guys, you might start to feel that something's going on, that I'm intending something.
And the same with the hypnotic subject. But we get these lines of force actually even continue in graphical representations of hypnotism.
You know, this there's something going on here.
And what I'm saying is these images a you know, here in the popular consciousness, though, they're you know,
I'm sure as soon as I said the word hypnotism, people thought of Derren Brown, for example.
So another current of influence is the way in which hypnotism has been traditionally used in psychotherapy to access the unconscious,
in particular repressed trauma considered a legitimate form of therapeutic practice.
Until the 1990s, it became apparent fear in a series of successful lawsuits against American therapists.
They were all American perps. And this happened in America mainly,
who were unwittingly encouraging their clients to develop dissociative identity disorder and false memories of traumatic experiences.
Rivera and Sullivan have studied the prevalence of these associations of dissociative identity disorder with mental illnesses such as depression,
and show that the idea that these things are related to one another continue to provide that
the popular consciousness and hypnotism as well as a kind of suggestion feeds into that.
So the most compelling moments of the artistic experiments I've made were moments
of spontaneity in the scratchcard performances and in I Will Buy Your Dreams.
Participants seemed to demonstrate a level of self-awareness. They second guess themselves.
They were apologising and tentative, and their responses and stories seemed well rehearsed.
People told me dreams that they clearly told to people before, and that they were willing to and ready to let go of.
People's responses were very different to the guided dreaming of Nova Santos, and I think this was key.
The key aspect to this was the use of something called a process suggestion.
And I'll give you an example now.
So price the suggestion would be in a moment I'd like you to imagine a place it could be a real place or an imaginary place.
It could be a place of your past or your present or your future. But it's your place and your place only.
And that's a place where you can feel really glad that you found yourself in.
And it's a place that only things that make you feel happy and secure will be there and allow that place to come to your mind now.
So if I'd gotten you guys to lie down for sorry if I got you guys to sort of lie down and go for a relaxation induction.
Before I said that, you probably found it very easy for something to kind of appear in your mind's eye and probably sort of,
you know, thinking of some lovely place, hopefully had it.
So this is what Michael Jaco calls a process suggestion. It's structures and make space for experience, but it's free of specific content.
And people are often very excited to report their experiences.
They're often really interesting and sometimes confused about what I did and didn't tell them to imagine.
They'll ask, Did you say it was sunny or did I just imagine that?
Well, the content of process suggestions that the right role arrives in the mind is usually
interpreted as being far from the unconscious and therefore authentically bears.
So the process, just the content of process suggestions that arrive in the mind are usually interpreted as being from the unconscious sorry,
and therefore authentically bears. But at the same time, the fact that they appear on the hypnosis adds another layer.
Framing them as involuntary and other the hypnotic instructional to allow something to just comes to mind
promotes a tendency to allow the mind to wander and to generate imagery in a way that feels kind of authentic.
There's also a particular quality to the content of these suggestions,
and in Hitman three foot therapy that they used to treat phobias and bad habits.
A technique that is referred to by Jonathan Chase as a magic bullet.
There's an element of conjuring that gives these spontaneous experiences a sense of veracity that can appear seemingly magical.
And a typical example comes from an acquaintance who I hypnotised to stop biting his nails under hypnosis.
I asked him to generate a symbol that would stand for the habit.
He later told me, and he was quite perplexed about this, that the symbol for his nail biting was a tiger.
And when we discussed it further, he told me he bit his nails when he was angry and he made this gesture.
So these kinds of tidy symbols have turned up a lot in my practice,
and I've spent plenty of time questioning whether or not it's just the intelligence of
people figuring out why they make sense rather than them actually making any sense.
But why wouldn't human beings as intelligent, problem solving,
walking biographies not be able to reach for meaningful pointers, if not magic bullets that might shed light on a problem?
So there's a long precedent for thinking about these kinds of thoughts, image forms and the imaginary discuss discusses the idea of symbolic schemas,
a form of non-reflective ideation, a form of knowledge, experience that appears directly in the mind.
He describes the scheme of us.
The schema accompanies the effort of intellectual property, so-called, and it presents in the form of a special object, the results of that effort.
The symbolic image appears first when the subject makes the effort of comprehension
and the subject would decipher this image and find in it just the meaning.
Sort and uninformed observer cannot comprehend a symbolic schema if he is shown a sketch of it without explanation.
Now Evan Thompson talks about the cognitive science studies of sleep onset,
particularly hitting go shapes, forms and impressions that appear to people on the edge of sleep.
And he suggests that imagery of this type is actually associated with the integration of
procedural and implicit memory and that memory being brought into existing knowledge.
So procedural memory is memory of activities, behaviours and movements and these kind of doing things, memories.
It's probably people here who could do a better job of this rather than declarative memory, which is facts and information.
So it's implicit is unconscious memory, procedural memory.
So we actually run.
So this is a Womersley and Stickgold did an experiment where they showed they got people to play Tetris and then got them to go to sleep.
And a really high number of of the people that they then woke up repeatedly had images of Tetris blocks in their minds.
So we're rehearsing what we the tasks that we've been doing and learning continue about that.
So regardless of the value of how these images actually relate to the content of experiences,
they are easily woven into understanding of magically appearing insights into the self.
There were many other examples of in culture rooted practices that involve shifts of volition
or the attribution of the content of spontaneous thoughts or dreams to other entities.
For example, Team Lerman's Anthropological Study of the way in which members of the Vineyard an evangelical revivalist church in the United States.
Learn through social interactions, study metaphor and diary,
keeping to monitor their own inner thought processes and mental images in a way that allows them to hear God talking back to them.
She describes her experience in the church.
Thus you are asked to experience some of your thoughts of being as being more like perceptions in a church like the Vineyard.
God participates in your mind and you hear what He says as if it were external speech.
The general model is clear enough. God wants to be your friend.
You develop that relationship through prayer. Prayer is hard work and requires effort and training.
And when you develop that relationship,
God will answer back through thoughts and mental images He places in your mind and through sensations he causes in your body.
You still experience those thoughts and images and sensations for the most part,
as if they were your own generated from within your own mind and body.
But you have to learn to experience those you have identified as God's is different than even these
evangelical Christians that not only have to accept the basic idea that they can experience God directly,
but they must develop the interpretative tools to do so in a way that they can authentically experience what feels like inner thought
as God generated through an effortful shifting of attribution and an attention to the involuntary and spontaneous mental events,
the elusive, unreal and fantastical information takes on authority for members of the Vineyard.
Authenticity is a hard won quality of experience and paradoxically almost diametrically
opposed the kinds of authenticity we might associate with the physical given real.
They are supported by the culture and ways of talking within the church and the way in which other congregants,
for further along the process describe and record their own experiences in diaries and guidebooks.
And this kind of belief and interpretation is built up in collaboration with others.
Does anyone keeping a note of the time for. What's so interesting?
Yes. I've got one more question. Okay. So I'm just going to finish with a thought that I couldn't leave out.
In his book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism.
Colin Campbell proposed the idea that modern consumerism is associated with something called he calls self illusory hedonism,
a cultural experience that has its roots in Romanticist media, such as the model, the novel.
And he says that practices like behaviours like daydreaming are actually more satisfying to us than, than real hedonistic experiences.
And that contemporary culture is filled with types of media that train us to be able to experience
hedonistic and self-directed fantasies that aren't interfered with by the annoying aspects of real life.
And I just I'd like to quote just like from the end of his book, because it's quite fantastic.
There are problems, I think, with some of his work, but so longing and permanent, unfocused dissatisfaction,
a complimentary features of that distinctive outlook generated by self illusory hedonism.
And both can be said to be the inevitable consequences of the practice of daydreaming.
For no matter how far individuals attempt to exercise restraint over their individualist pursuit of imaginary pleasure,
either in order to pay greater attention to the extent agencies of reality or to prevent the development of extravagant fantasies.
There is a sense in which this would always be left to light.
It would be too late because they will have already eaten off the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Dreams.
That is, they will have lived that particular slice of unreal life and sample its delights.
That is, they will with the consequence, whether they wish it or not, the actuality will now be judged by its standards.
To this extent, daydreaming makes an irreversible difference to the way people feel about the life they lead.
And I guess my my speculation is really that the people who are practising
these different kind of activities are making use of of an existing capacity.
That's part of our culture and perhaps one that's not about it's not something about delusion,
but an active and creative use or desire to put to place an authenticity and and value on those imaginings.
If so, what I've discussed might seem to be about the way that people delude themselves.
But if we take into account the pleasure of the imaginary that Campbell points to,
we see another interpretation that we actively seek to modify the way in which we experience our own minds and give value to our inner worlds.
Perhaps in this play of agency, instead of giving up our control, people are in some ways taking something back.
I'm going to stop. So what someone asked me to do was someone sent me, Andres,
that the paper the described the experiment that Andrew was just telling me, telling us about,
and asked me to think across from that to how authenticity might figure in initially writing and indeed writing in general,
and indeed the kinds of writing that I do and we all do academic writing and fiction and the interface between them.
So that's what I going to try to do, and I'll try and work on some references to what Hannah's just kind of shared with us, shared with us as well.
I love it. Actually, in the in the experiment you told us about Andrew that it's the copies that that provoke the most intense brain activity.
That when you're looking at it, when those experimental subjects were looking at the copies, they were really looking at them.
Whereas when they were looking at the original. Thomas Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Actually, something I wondered about was, you know, they're all in a sense, they're all copies, aren't they?
Because they're digital image images, which connects to something I'm going to be saying about, you know, printed books in a minute.
So I want to start from that detail of the work that Andrew has presented.
The surprising result,
the surprising result of the images that were able copies provokes more brain activity than the images that were labelled originals.
And that's perhaps a surprise because of exactly because of that high value that Western culture places on originals,
although it does it does kind of chime with what it's like in that room where the Mona Lisa is,
which is to say that very many people are in the presence of the Mona Lisa,
but not very many people are actually are actually, you know, studying it and in great detail.
But what I think the thing I want to take and think across the literature with is the point that the
context in which the viewing is done is important in determining what kind of viewing the viewing is.
So looking at an image can be many different activities and the same is true.
So I'm just I thought it would be best to. Okay, yeah.
So the way the experiment was set up implicitly asked the question.
So the way in which copies, you know, in our culture we typically encounter copies isn't in that way.
But these experimental subjects were by being shown a series of images and told that some
of them were copies and some of them were originals that implicitly set up a question.
And so the way in which they responded to this distinction that was being presented to
them was determined partly by the context in which the viewing was being asked to be done.
You know, and more usually in our culture, you go to an art gallery and you see originals.
There isn't a copy to compare them to, or you're reading an artwork and it's all picture,
you know, it's all photographs of paintings and then on originals to compare them to.
So there isn't that, you know, implicit question created by the viewing situation.
So what we see from that is that the context in which the viewing is done is important to determining what the viewing is looking at.
An image can be many different activities and the same is true of reading.
You know, you can read something in an intensely analytical way as when you're doing a piece of literary criticism about it.
You read something for fun, you can scan a text for the information it gives you and so on.
Different text, different kinds of text are designed to prompt different reading practices.
You know, you can read a newspaper article with the same sort of attention that you would normally give to a poem, but it's not the usual thing to do.
You can scan a novel for sociological information, but it's more usual to read it in an imaginatively involved way.
Now, this is well known, of course,
and the word for the interrelation between what texts are like and the reading practice they ask for is genre and all.
I want to point out by saying this is that a way of describing what happened in the experiment about a
description of originality and descriptions of being a copy is that it gave different genre prompts,
attach different descriptions of genre to the different kinds of images, and this prompted different genres of response.
And one thought arising from this is that I wonder if it might be interesting to look at whether
different readers of whether different genres of reading might show up in the same way,
whether it's possible to see the difference between, say, reading an instruction manual and reading a novel and reading a poem.
And perhaps this has been done already. I don't know.
This really is a genuinely interdisciplinary seminar in that I know nothing about the brain and Andrew's field at all.
So in literature and with writing in general, the relationship between original and copy is not the same as in the visual arts.
With books, the distinction of original form copy disintegrates.
All books are copies, and therefore all books are originals, with perhaps an exception, which I'll come to in a minute.
Of course, there are such things as books with antiquarian value.
You know, Shakespeare First Folio can go for nearly £3 million, which is almost you know, you can always get a painting for that.
But they're not originals in the sense that a Van Gogh painting might be or an original Rembrandt might be.
You know, they're not unique. Well, you know, a Shakespeare scholar would say that each.
A copy of the First Folio has a uniqueness about it, but it's not the same kind of uniqueness that an original painting has.
And of course, there are manuscripts which are like authentic paintings, and that they come direct from the hand of the creator.
But they're also not like authentic paintings, because in print culture, at least, they're usually not the finished work.
The finished work is usually a printed book which necessarily exists or can exist in multiple identical copies when a book is not like this.
So in a in a manuscript culture or in say, for instance,
some hand finished and hand illustrated books by William Blake say when confronted with that kind of book,
we feel we're moving out of the realm of literature towards the realm of the visual arts.
With literature, the original is inherently also a copy.
And incidentally, this is why the massive anarchy of copying, which is the Internet, poses a great threat to the regime of regulated copying,
which is the publishing industry, and does not pose a similar threat to art galleries.
You know, you're still experiencing Middlemarch,
whether you're reading it in a first edition or a penguin classic or on, you know, on your screen from Gutenberg.
But as we saw with the image of, you know, the Mona Lisa, people still generally feel that they're not really experiencing the Mona Lisa.
If they're looking at a digital image of it on Wikimedia Commons, they still feel the need to go and pay their entrance fee in the art gallery.
Um. Right. This means that the notion of authenticity is harder to pin down in literature than the visual arts.
It necessarily includes a larger dose of metaphor.
In the visual arts, there is a solid central meaning of the word authentic.
A painting can be authenticated as a Titian, but if you were to authenticate a novel as being by Dickens, you wouldn't be doing the same thing.
Indeed, this is an authentic Dickens novel would be a slightly odd thing to say.
And even in the realm of forensic Shakespeare studies, where there are live questions about how much of a given plays from the hand of Shakespeare.
What is at stake in those questions of authenticity is somewhat different from what is at stake with a painting in literature
that can be text which pretend to be older than they are and ought to be by someone different from the person who wrote them.
For instance, the 18th century English poet Thomas Chatterton published poems which he pretended were by an imaginary 15th century poet Thomas Rowley,
or in the 1980s, a children's author, an Anglican priest, Toby Ford, pretended to be a young Asian woman.
Raheel Khan, writing stories that were read out on radio for ascribe to that fake author real name and published by Virago
and then had to be withdrawn when the the truth of their origin the facts about their origin came out.
There are books that pretend to be in a genre that they're not, for instance, to be an autobiography when they are in fact,
fiction or partly fictional infamous instances here of the American Misery memoir by James Frey published 2003,
which turned out to include a lot of exaggeration and fabrication with the result that the author was confronted and humiliated on Oprah,
or a 1997 book by Misha de Fonseca, first written in English but best known in a French first version.
Sylvie Lulu Surviving with Wolves, which was made into a film which turned out to be completely fictional.
Now, these cases, cases like these are complicated by the fact that the pretence of being something
that it's not is a very prominent element of literary writing in general,
and it manifests itself in many guises. The subtitle of Jane Eyre is an autobiography.
It's not an autobiography. Don Quixote is presented as being translated from an Arabic source.
It's not translated from an Arabic source.
Writers can write under pseudonyms, and there's an obvious continuity between this and the established tactics of narrative,
such as adopting a narrative voice and the structuring of texts. As soon as you're using language, you're introducing shapes and biases.
You're making something. And the distinction between making and making up is tricky, indeed impossible to pin down.
Now, one reaction to this complex scenario is to adopt a trite version of postmodernism, to say that because everything is text,
everything is inauthentic, and we shouldn't really be using shouldn't really be worrying about this word authentic anymore.
It's been found out as an old fashioned conspiracy.
And this is a line that you still see peddled by, say,
Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley in the guise of the chronological institute or whatever they call themselves.
For instance, in a declaration of inauthenticity, which is a kind of knockabout fun.
But what that sort of position neglects is that there are kinds of writing and kinds of ways of taking them, this kind of genre thing.
Degrees of credence. Degrees of trust. All the time.
When we encounter language with gauging what kind of language it is and how to take it.
And sometimes people enjoy being played within their suspects, you know,
in lots and lots of fictional instances, scandals like the fake case and the Fonseka case,
when people feel they haven't been allowed to enter into the arena of interpretation on fair terms when they feel they've been duped.
So that so there's a general question about what kind of writing it is that we negotiate the whole time.
And one of the things that literary writing can do is kind of play with that, tease us about that.
And I think we need to see that scandal of like fake misery memoirs enter into that general potentiality of the arena of text reality.
But they they make people feel duped. They do it in a way that people feel they you know, people you know,
people feel I've been tricked in thinking about this and thinking about where to draw distinctions here.
I find I'm helped by some of the formulations in David Shields, his book, Reality, Hunger, A Manifesto from 2010.
So Shield says, for instance, it's a series. It's a kind of gathering of aphorisms.
And there are a couple of quotations on the handout I put around this gathering of aphorisms,
each of which is kind of angled in relation to the others. So one of them is at once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice.
I know all the moments are moments staged and theatrical shaped and thematic.
Nevertheless, Shields proposes, you know, so that getting rid of a kind of surplus.
That notion of the authentic as not being staged nevertheless feels proposes.
We can still think in terms of gradations of authenticity or a kind of an endeavour towards something that will be accepted as authentic.
So in the case of autobiography and memoir, which is necessarily always shaped, as I've said,
necessarily always to an extent fictional Shield says what the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade
him or her that the narrator is trying as honestly as possible to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.
Actually, I'm I'm a bit uneasy about that word, honestly, there.
It's a little bit simple the way it appears in that sentence.
But I think the thing to realise here is that because this is one statement among many that are gathered together,
each somewhat at odds with the ones around it in the surrounding text,
some pressure is put on what might be because the word honestly there, just as I've quoted it, begs quite a lot of questions, I think.
And those questions are at least raised in other other texts around it.
But what I want to take from this is the sense of authenticity as a mode of endeavour
and the sense of an endeavour towards authenticity as asking to be shared.
You know, the ability to persuade someone.
I'd like to extend what Shields says by pointing out that this kind of writing then asks for a kind of engagement from the reader.
If we take authenticity in writing as an endeavour,
then it asks readers to participate in that endeavour to identify the kind of endeavour that it is and join in it in the way they read.
One of the things I like about this way of putting it is that it's transferable to other contexts.
You know, how can we talk about authenticity in an academic paper, say, you know, well,
a feeling that something is at stake for the person writing or giving it perhaps,
and a corresponding claim on the attention of the people reading or listening.
Now, I'm going to say something briefly now about translation before coming back to this piece of memoir or autobiography fiction,
which I'm trying to work on at the moment. Translations are often treated as copies.
So this is coming back to when I was talking, saying about how all printed books are copies, equally copies.
And I was saying, you know, there might be an exception. I think translations are sometimes too often treated as a kind of exception.
Actually, the thing about under your experiment in which everything you were showing was a digital image,
and yet nonetheless the description copy versus the description original was still felt to have meaning.
I mean, nobody said I don't know if anybody had said, but, you know, this seems not to be insignificant.
Anyone saying I simply they're all copies. It's just simply that distinction has no meaning.
So the way translations relate to other printed books is a bit like that, I feel.
Translations are then, you know, even though all books are in a sense copies,
there's a way in which translations are singled out and treated as particularly copies.
And if you think about actually the word original and the where the word original
tends to or is still allowed to appear in critical discourse these days,
it's often in discussions of translations, which is to say, as soon as you're talking about a translation,
there's a tendency then to compare it against something that gets defined as the original.
But if you're just reading a book you don't think I'm reading, look at me, I'm reading the original.
You know, it's only in the context of comparison with the translation that the word original
tends to offer itself when a translation is corrected against the source,
for instance, in a school translation exercise. Translation is being treated as a copy in legal or political frameworks.
Translations, for instance, of international treaties can function as copies.
But what's revealing, I think, about both these cases is that in both of them,
there's clearly a strong regulatory framework by which the idea of the copy is maintained.
School translations are done with a particular aim and marked against specific criteria.
Translations of treaties are anchored in an international institutional interpretive structure which determines how they can be used.
So it takes a lot of effort to, in fact, to hold a translation to the idea of a copy, you know,
because translations are obviously different from their sources in all sorts of ways and in freer contexts like literary translation,
we can see and accept this fact.
You know, the translations are always importantly different, often interestingly different, both from their sources and from one another.
So. The regime of the copy very markedly doesn't fit this sort of translation.
And this is what there's a lot more that could be said about this coming from the direction of translation studies.
But that the single point I want to make about it that's relevant in our context is that I think
the word authenticity can be helpful in doing justice to the interpretive and imaginative work,
which is always part of translation, at least when it's done by humans and is especially part of literary translation.
Here we need to ask what is the thing that's being that we feel is being translated?
You know, when when a book is being translated and you say this text has got something from this text, you know, what thing is that?
Where does it come from? You know, the meaning and the rhythm and the tone and everything else that we might want to translate on.
Simply there in the source text, they have to be collaboratively brought into being by a process of reading and imagining.
In translating, you have to bring into being the sense of the text, which you then try to re realise in other words,
and the lines between reading and noticing and finding other words.
The borders between these processes are fuzzy and shifting.
And that's why in translation there'll always be different translations of the same source,
which you can't adjudicate between on the basis of accuracy.
You can't adjudicate between them as copies. Now on the sheet, next thing on the sheet,
last thing on the sheet is a bit of testimony about this from an interview in The Guardian with Michael Hoffman.
He's a really brilliant translator. So the interview says one of his guiding principles for translating is to avoid the obvious word,
even if it is the literal equivalent of the original.
In the second paragraph of Hopkins version of Metamorphosis, Greg or Sam so doesn't ask what happened to me.
Vast miscommunication, but what's the matter with me?
Hoffman Lie the word he says because it sounds like someone having trouble getting up after having died.
So Hoffman aware of the obvious words, things.
I don't like the feel of that and I look for something else. And in explaining this movement, he says, nobody will notice but you.
You've taken a step back from the original. You've given yourself a little bit of self esteem, a little bit of originality, a little bit of boldness.
Then the whole thing will appear. Automotive. Look, it's running on English rather than limping after the German.
Now, I don't really like that word automotive there.
I think it undersells what's happening because he likes the joke and I think it undersells what's happening.
I think it would be better to say in this kind of process, you can see that the whole thing has come from a person, it's being remade, it has a style.
And this process of imagining in working out, it's like what Shields says about trusting that someone is trying to get to the bottom of something.
When the translation has when you is has a style of this kind, you can trust that the translator has been a man,
or at least you can trust the translation asks for a kind of trust in you.
It asks to be considered. Perhaps this is something that we can perhaps reach for the word authenticity to help us think about.
It's not being offered to you as just a copy. I'm not turning back now to memoirs and somewhat uneasily to my own practice.
I want to carry across this idea that an endeavour of style or perhaps voice.
I don't really like the word voice, but it's a word that people use in this context and form.
The use of style and form can work as a sign of that endeavour to get to the bottom of something which Shields calls authenticity.
And so it can be a way of making that claim on readers to be considered as making a claim to authenticity, which I talked about before.
And I've been struggling this because in the memoir ish thing that I'm in the process of writing,
which I'm finding very difficult, I found that when what I'm writing finds a form or offers itself as formed.
And this is where I feel there's a connection with what Hannah was saying.
I feel that it is grounded and has something that I could almost use the word authenticity about.
Whereas when I'm just trying to write about something as I remember, and I'm just writing about it, that feels superficial by comparison.
And the reason for this so this seems to me a little bit like actually that structure of process suggestion that you were describing,
which is to say that when I feel that a structure is emerging from me,
that I'm not choosing to have emerge, that feels like a kind of a kind of guarantor in a way.
And obviously that's a sign of an interrelation between the imagination and the unconscious.
So that connects to the kind of theme of these seminars.
Now, this feeling has some kinship with what often happens in writing something fictional
when the story takes on its own momentum or the characters take on a life of their own.
And lots of people sort of obviously testify to that feeling.
But what I feel is the difference between the feeling I have about this memoir and that kind
of commonly felt feeling about fiction is that is that when it happens in fiction writing,
that thing of the characters taking on their own life is the sign of a successfully conjured fictional world, perhaps.
Whereas, in this memoir I'm writing, I want the memoir to be anchored, in fact, and I want every fact to be true.
So I'm not happy with saying it's the same kind of thing,
because I feel that when you're writing fiction, that feeling is a sort of release into fiction ality.
Whereas when I'm trying to write this memoir thing, I don't really want to feel that any of it has got any fictional ity in it at all.
I want to feel that it's all testimony.
But on the other hand, because on the other hand, form is is obviously to some extent in conflict with that ambition,
because as soon as something is manifestly formed, it's manifestly pulling away from a genre of, you know, factual reporting.
I mean, that's why we don't have a category fiction for poetry. And I'm prose.
It's important to have the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. But we don't talk about this being a fictional life.
In this being a non-fictional poem. It is obvious because it's in rhyme that it's got a strange relation to a motive of kind of presenting fact.
Okay. So in this context of the memoir.
What I feel that form manifests is my own little bit of originality, as Hoffman would say,
a little bit of boldness, a sign that I'm trying to get to the bottom of an experience.
So I suppose the translation model kind of roughly and again, I'm not completely happy with this,
but the translation model kind of roughly maps onto memoir writing in the sense that you feel like there is a kind of inchoate text of memory.
And what I'm trying to do is translate the text of memory into a text of language, and that this process of not choosing the obvious word,
as it were, allowing a form to emerge, has some kinship with what Hoffman was talking about in his translation practice.
Another thing that I find formal patterns do is help different kinds of language to be brought into conjunction and weighed out.
And I feel that this too, becomes part of an attempt to get to the bottom of something.
And I'm just going to read because I feel I have no choice.
I'm just going to read a couple of bits out so you can kind of see the kind of thing I'm talking about.
And I do just want to read one bit, but then I felt it wouldn't make sense without one before it.
And the couple of bits I'm about to read,
you'll see that we move through some institutional language and then there's a protest against it, which takes the form of metaphor.
And then in the second bit, we move through some descriptive language, and then there's a bit of medical language and then a moment of protest,
which again is metaphor and in fact rhymes with the first moment of protest.
And I'm only realising this because I thought, okay, what on earth can I offer up in this seminar?
I didn't think this before I wrote them. I just sort of I just wrote them.
And now I'm just sort of wondering how they might how they might connect to this this context.
And I guess what's happening with these different kinds of writing brought into
relation through a formal structure is that I feel the way that different kinds
of writing are arranged triangulate to project the possibility of a position
beyond any one of these languages from which they can be appraised or weighed up.
And I feel that that is the thing that stakes makes a claim to authenticity,
which is to say that if I were to offer a narrative or comment about the kind of thing I'm writing about,
I would be too much giving myself over to a language and there would be a loss of authenticity in that.
Whereas I feel that when different modes of description are juxtaposed and there's a position
that sort of this and they project a position that stands outside any of those languages,
that feels like something I can offer up to be perceived as authentic.
Okay, the context is there really nasty bits as well.
The context of this is an accident that happened to my mother. She fell down stairs.
She's elderly lady. She fell down stairs and broke many bones, broke many vertebrae.
But she was fundamentally okay in the hospital. She was fundamentally okay because her spinal cord wasn't damaged.
So she was going to get better. And then that night in the hospital on the ward,
she was allowed to fall out of bed because she was deranged and that rendered her quadriplegic completely paralysed.
So that was a horrible incident. And so what I'm kind of struggling to find a way of writing about that.
Among that, there are kind of happy bits in the in the book.
So this is and these are the two sections that kind of focus on trying to find a way of saying something about that.
The hospital said when it rang in the middle of the night that my mother had fallen from her hospital bed to the floor,
but it wasn't anything serious. The scan had been done and there was no extra damage to bones or spine.
Though she did have a little cut in her forehand.
The hospital said a couple of days later that my mother would probably never walk again and we could expect her to recover movement in her upper body.
The hospital said some weeks further down the line that my mother might well regain control of her arms,
but sadly, probably not her fingers all the same.
A period of specialist rehab at Stoke Mandeville could do a great deal.
It was a wonderful program. The hospital said later still that my mother no longer had the cognitive ability to benefit
from Specialist Rehab at Stoke Mandeville or anywhere else she could not remember.
So she could not learn. She would never be able to manage clever eye tracking devices or passive operated switches.
In any case, there wasn't much point trying to enable her to read, since she'd lost the capacity to understand long stretches of text.
The never say never. The hospital said change is always possible, but probably not in this case.
The hospital said, no, probably not.
In fact, of course, human beings spoke all these words, human beings whose eyes were bright or sly, whose hair was red or blonde, who had presence,
warmth and individuality and feeling, whose bodies were capable of movement and sensation, and whose minds possessed full cognitive ability.
Which is the cruellest way of killing hope, mildew or the size.
Next time. This is the room where. What happened to my mother really happened.
This is the room where a nurse turned her back and walked out, leaving my mother alone.
This is the room where only a few minutes earlier, I too had turned my back and walked out, leaving my mother alone.
It was so high up, so technological, so clean.
There was a strip of windows all the way from one wall to another,
and through them you could see floating distant lights of apartment blocks and offices and flowing distant lines of cars and beyond them,
some amber studded hills. And above them, the winking stars.
There. She lay on a high up cot in a cluster of attentive machines.
Quiet, asleep, tranquillised, anaesthetised.
Embalmed. Or so I thought. Swaddled in expertise.
And yet after I turned my back and walked out and after the nurse had turned her back and walked out,
leaving my mother alone, she opened her eyes and moved.
Despite her broken pelvis and broken ribs and broken collarbone and fractured vertebrae and fractured skull and severe concussion.
She moved. She thought she wanted to go to the loo or to check on my father or make him some sandwiches or to go home.
She rolled Hollywood herself up and tipped.
This is the room that put a dent in her forehead the size of an oyster.
This is the room that put multiple modules of gas in her spinal canal.
This is the room that gave her mid cervical into spine as ligament injury and
an acute traumatic cord injury of see 4 to 5 as she encountered the floor.
The floor as hard as a hammer, as smooth as a knife.
Okay. So I'm just going to. So that's that's what I found myself writing and I can say more about it.
So one of the things that interest me, for instance, is that this is the I realise we've realised a few days later,
you know, there's that Auden poem, this is a nightmare crossing the border.
So on the really odd things that happened to me when I was doing that section was that form just I thought is coming out of me in that form.
And then you realise later that, okay, that, that thing this is, that has come from somewhere else, but it's still felt as though it didn't.
So I don't really, I just wanted to end with that and I don't really have any conclusions except to say that, um, it, uh.
Yeah. Um, I don't have any conclusions, but thank you.