1
00:00:04,890 --> 00:00:09,840
So we have three speakers today and Professor Puckett is going to speak first.

2
00:00:10,290 --> 00:00:11,820
I will give you a quick introduction.

3
00:00:12,900 --> 00:00:18,540
So Andrew Parker is currently a professor of physiology and a fellow of St John's College at the University of Oxford.

4
00:00:19,710 --> 00:00:24,930
His research covers several aspects of spatial vision and neuronal mechanisms of perceptual decisions.

5
00:00:25,230 --> 00:00:30,990
He presently is working on neurophysiology and neuro imaging of stereoscopic vision.

6
00:00:32,010 --> 00:00:35,850
He's held the leadership of senior research associate and a Wolfson Merit Award from the Society.

7
00:00:36,120 --> 00:00:40,020
He's been invited scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

8
00:00:40,950 --> 00:00:46,019
In his in his spare time, can I say that he's founded the first English State School,

9
00:00:46,020 --> 00:00:51,060
offering three fully bilingual streams, teaching the European schools curriculum.

10
00:00:52,020 --> 00:00:58,050
And today he's going to talk about how brain activity is altered by trusting the advice of experts.

11
00:00:58,290 --> 00:01:05,310
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.

12
00:01:09,620 --> 00:01:14,210
So thank you and thank you so much. And it's a great pleasure to be here.

13
00:01:15,320 --> 00:01:23,600
And thank you for coming out on a day like this when we should probably all be outside.

14
00:01:24,230 --> 00:01:28,230
Now, the first thing is that I'm still learning how to.

15
00:01:29,180 --> 00:01:36,590
So that one. Yeah. Okay. So as Simon said, this is actually what I do in this in my spare time.

16
00:01:36,800 --> 00:01:44,210
And the real topical reason for just showing you this very quickly is it's being published today.

17
00:01:44,390 --> 00:01:52,460
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.

18
00:01:52,730 --> 00:02:00,680
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,

19
00:02:01,100 --> 00:02:06,469
I'm mostly interested in what the brain does under those circumstances and why

20
00:02:06,470 --> 00:02:10,940
that fails in a number of individuals and that little creatures atmosphere.

21
00:02:10,940 --> 00:02:19,490
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.

22
00:02:21,170 --> 00:02:25,040
And I'm good to talk about trust in experts.

23
00:02:25,040 --> 00:02:31,400
And as part of this, I'm going to talk about a study that we did actually turns out now a few years ago.

24
00:02:32,120 --> 00:02:41,960
But it seems to be part of a continuing discussion that I've been having with people in the arts and humanities.

25
00:02:42,260 --> 00:02:47,690
And I think I mean, it's it's of an unusual nature,

26
00:02:48,800 --> 00:02:55,400
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.

27
00:02:58,700 --> 00:03:05,480
If we think about experts and trust and relate that to authenticity,

28
00:03:06,590 --> 00:03:13,309
the route into this particular framework that I'm talking about is that often we do

29
00:03:13,310 --> 00:03:18,740
actually rely on the opinions of others in deciding whether or not something is authentic.

30
00:03:20,040 --> 00:03:27,810
And we carry around that implicit knowledge, if you like, a form of unconscious memory as we go about our daily life,

31
00:03:28,080 --> 00:03:32,730
often told actually questioning and uprooting everything, even as a scientist.

32
00:03:32,970 --> 00:03:38,520
I'm not going back to the empirical evidence that proves X or Y.

33
00:03:38,760 --> 00:03:41,520
I'm often just accepting that that has been done.

34
00:03:42,030 --> 00:03:48,239
And this element of trust is quite interesting from a the point of view of a cognitive neuroscientist,

35
00:03:48,240 --> 00:03:55,530
because it has both the element of rational thinking and the element of emotion about it.

36
00:03:55,710 --> 00:03:58,920
The two seem to come together when we actually trust something.

37
00:03:58,920 --> 00:04:03,450
It's not. It's neither one or the other. It's a it's something of both of them.

38
00:04:03,690 --> 00:04:12,530
And therefore, it's a very interesting area to explore. Now I'm going to begin with what are these people doing here?

39
00:04:14,500 --> 00:04:21,970
And as many of you will know, this is the room in the loop where the Mona Lisa is is hung.

40
00:04:22,600 --> 00:04:25,760
And there she is. And all these people are in the room.

41
00:04:27,250 --> 00:04:35,140
To see the Mona Lisa. Actually, lots of nice paintings around here, but they're all looking in that direction.

42
00:04:36,580 --> 00:04:44,020
And if you rate it as an aesthetic experience, it's actually not terrific.

43
00:04:45,460 --> 00:04:48,850
In fact, many of them are doing it in a mediated form anyway.

44
00:04:49,780 --> 00:04:54,850
They might as well be looking at the Internet for what they're going to take home from this.

45
00:04:55,330 --> 00:05:00,070
But nonetheless, they're powerfully drawn to this room from the point of view of a biologist.

46
00:05:00,700 --> 00:05:06,430
There's lots of people there. That's interesting. They spent quite a lot of resources to get there.

47
00:05:06,880 --> 00:05:11,800
Resources they could have spent on other things if they were more important or significant.

48
00:05:12,670 --> 00:05:21,910
And interestingly, and if you like socio biologically, it's something we drive our children to.

49
00:05:22,030 --> 00:05:28,330
You must come and see the Mona Lisa. So there's something kind of vertical and cultural about that.

50
00:05:28,360 --> 00:05:33,820
So all of those things get drawn together. And as a biologist, I find those very interesting.

51
00:05:35,300 --> 00:05:45,080
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?

52
00:05:45,290 --> 00:05:51,890
Well, there's a little plaque on the wall that's telling us that that is the real Mona Lisa and not a fake.

53
00:05:52,970 --> 00:05:56,450
And no doubt, there's lots of conspiracy theories around.

54
00:05:56,720 --> 00:05:59,840
If you went on the Internet, who would say, well, it's not really the Mona Lisa.

55
00:05:59,870 --> 00:06:04,939
That's, you know, a fake. They don't put the real Mona Lisa in the gallery and so on and so forth.

56
00:06:04,940 --> 00:06:08,000
But everybody is drawn there by the fact that this is the real thing.

57
00:06:08,270 --> 00:06:14,540
And that's the element that I wanted to talk about in in this this afternoon.

58
00:06:16,310 --> 00:06:20,540
Now, how do we know that that plaque is telling the truth?

59
00:06:20,570 --> 00:06:25,490
Well, lots of experts have gone into this. They've looked at provenance and so on and so forth.

60
00:06:26,530 --> 00:06:32,230
And I picked up a quote from the EU referendum debate.

61
00:06:32,860 --> 00:06:37,600
Actually just last week Michael Gove said, We've had enough of experts.

62
00:06:37,900 --> 00:06:41,020
We don't want anymore experts. People have had enough of that.

63
00:06:42,180 --> 00:06:44,700
And that's a real challenge to people like us.

64
00:06:46,020 --> 00:06:58,760
Because we are supposed to be gathering together expertise and at least evaluating things and passing that out as an opinion of you,

65
00:06:59,280 --> 00:07:05,970
which we hope other people will be convinced with. And we spend quite a lot of time investigating and thinking about.

66
00:07:06,390 --> 00:07:12,750
So actually, if you begin to distrust experts, quite a lot of the framework that we work in begins to crumble.

67
00:07:13,320 --> 00:07:17,430
And we need to, I think, understand a little bit about those processes.

68
00:07:19,130 --> 00:07:31,720
So. I contrast that with a view which has been around about what we should do with neuroscience and looking at artwork.

69
00:07:32,830 --> 00:07:35,680
And this was our starting point.

70
00:07:35,680 --> 00:07:45,580
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.

71
00:07:46,960 --> 00:07:51,880
For example, neuroscientists have gone off and searched for correlates of aesthetic quality.

72
00:07:52,390 --> 00:08:02,020
I'm presuming that's a perfectly clear concept that can actually be now just boxed and studied and looked at.

73
00:08:02,890 --> 00:08:07,480
And the problem has been, as I said there, often the art historians, connoisseurs,

74
00:08:07,480 --> 00:08:11,110
and they're not particularly interested in what neuroscientists think about aesthetics.

75
00:08:11,620 --> 00:08:18,010
They've got a pretty well well worked out framework. And after all, they've been thinking about these for a very long time.

76
00:08:18,020 --> 00:08:24,400
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.

77
00:08:29,320 --> 00:08:39,340
Just as an example of how this can go seriously wrong, as is this rather lovely example from the 19th century.

78
00:08:40,180 --> 00:08:50,470
This is a plaster copy of the Apollo Belvedere, self-evidently a an item of classical beauty.

79
00:08:51,670 --> 00:08:56,650
It's actually the one from the museum in Göttingen.

80
00:08:57,700 --> 00:09:03,840
And these lines here. Were placed there by the students of Felix Klein.

81
00:09:04,320 --> 00:09:08,640
Felix Klein, the Klein, the mathematician Klein of the Klein bottle.

82
00:09:09,630 --> 00:09:15,300
He put them there because they represent certain geometric features on the surface.

83
00:09:16,080 --> 00:09:20,970
And the belief was that by probing those geometric features and their distribution across the surface,

84
00:09:21,450 --> 00:09:26,240
this would reveal the true aesthetics underlying this.

85
00:09:26,250 --> 00:09:33,540
This would be a revelation. Now, of course, that seems extremely naive to us now that you could actually just step right in there.

86
00:09:33,540 --> 00:09:36,540
Obviously, the mathematics of form and beauty. Bang!

87
00:09:36,540 --> 00:09:40,770
There it is. But that was one way of thinking.

88
00:09:40,800 --> 00:09:47,640
It just shows how far wrong we can be with our own presumptions that we bring into these discussions.

89
00:09:48,750 --> 00:09:54,210
So rather than doing that, we decided and I'll tell you who we are in a minute.

90
00:09:55,020 --> 00:09:57,749
We decided that we would think about authenticity,

91
00:09:57,750 --> 00:10:03,600
because actually that's something that art historians and connoisseurs actually do think is significant.

92
00:10:05,900 --> 00:10:14,630
It's presumes to add to the aesthetic experience seeing the real Anjelica Rafael, Leonardo and so on is thought to be very important.

93
00:10:15,140 --> 00:10:19,940
It's also fought over and I'll show you the example from Rembrandt.

94
00:10:20,540 --> 00:10:26,180
And of course, ultimately, at least in the in the art world, it signifies a high economic value.

95
00:10:28,700 --> 00:10:37,580
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.

96
00:10:37,760 --> 00:10:43,760
And we tried to take that into an empirical experiment, A,

97
00:10:43,760 --> 00:10:49,790
in which we could begin to study what is happening in the brain when people are given

98
00:10:50,510 --> 00:10:56,600
instructions about whether or not a work is authentic or presumed to be a copy.

99
00:10:57,770 --> 00:11:08,480
And this was really driven by Ming Huang who came to Oxford on a Fulbright, and she wanted to do something about art.

100
00:11:08,750 --> 00:11:13,220
So she got in touch with Martin Kemp and we'd had some discussions previously.

101
00:11:13,550 --> 00:11:15,470
She got in touch with my colleague Holly Bridge,

102
00:11:15,710 --> 00:11:23,330
and the four of us got together and hammered out a proposal that would keep Meg Fay happy with this ambition of bringing together

103
00:11:23,600 --> 00:11:30,440
art and neuroscience and would keep us happy that we were actually lending our names to something that might take us somewhere.

104
00:11:32,990 --> 00:11:41,030
Now, the key into that Martin brought into this is there are a lot of Rembrandts and we know the genre.

105
00:11:41,060 --> 00:11:45,049
I mean, you know, if we show people a picture and say, oh, yeah, that's a Rembrandt,

106
00:11:45,050 --> 00:11:49,580
or at least I think it's a Rembrandt, the authenticity is actually actually not so well known.

107
00:11:49,760 --> 00:11:59,339
And actually, quite recently, our scholars have spent quite a lot of time going through the authenticity for this particular set of portraits.

108
00:11:59,340 --> 00:12:03,140
So you're going to be talking about and there've been some surprising findings,

109
00:12:03,350 --> 00:12:09,319
one, Rembrandt portraits, which were previously thought to be absolutely genuine.

110
00:12:09,320 --> 00:12:15,299
Rembrandt people are not quite so sure about now. And there are others which we can actually get much better evidence.

111
00:12:15,300 --> 00:12:20,780
And there's been a whole program in the Netherlands set up on the on the Rembrandt project.

112
00:12:22,240 --> 00:12:29,170
So what we took were 50 images taken actually from the Rembrandt Project's database.

113
00:12:29,620 --> 00:12:35,770
25 of these are actually genuinely now by that project attributed to Rembrandt himself.

114
00:12:36,600 --> 00:12:41,430
And another 25 are in the style of Rembrandt by someone else.

115
00:12:42,090 --> 00:12:49,739
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,

116
00:12:49,740 --> 00:12:56,340
some of these are not authentic. I'm going to call them copies without meaning that they're necessarily forgeries.

117
00:12:56,970 --> 00:13:02,160
And this is one of them. This is the authentic one.

118
00:13:03,700 --> 00:13:11,290
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.

119
00:13:11,650 --> 00:13:13,390
Again, it's the lady on the right.

120
00:13:14,460 --> 00:13:24,210
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.

121
00:13:24,210 --> 00:13:29,910
So they saw one image at a time. It might have been one of the genuine ones.

122
00:13:30,150 --> 00:13:36,210
It might have been one of the ones I'm going to call copies. And.

123
00:13:37,540 --> 00:13:42,860
We took 14 participants. We gave them a screening questionnaire.

124
00:13:42,880 --> 00:13:50,020
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.

125
00:13:50,020 --> 00:13:56,200
We didn't want, you know, any dphil students from art history because expertises will come onto that in a bit.

126
00:13:56,200 --> 00:13:59,350
But expertise is quite particular when you really get into it.

127
00:14:00,200 --> 00:14:04,120
And what we required, they wanted to we required them to look at Rembrandt,

128
00:14:04,750 --> 00:14:12,760
a brief bio of him, and then a brief explanation about fakes, copies, authenticity.

129
00:14:13,060 --> 00:14:16,150
And that was something that Martin prepared and we worked on.

130
00:14:16,990 --> 00:14:20,410
And we divided our participants into two groups, seven.

131
00:14:20,410 --> 00:14:32,830
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.

132
00:14:32,830 --> 00:14:40,640
So four out of that 50, remember, we've got 25 that are genuine and 25 that are copies.

133
00:14:40,930 --> 00:14:46,540
Well, in some of the group, then some of the copies were actually labelled as authentic.

134
00:14:47,590 --> 00:14:50,290
And some of the authentic ones are labelled as authentic.

135
00:14:50,530 --> 00:14:56,500
And then of the copies, some of them are labelled those authentic and some of them are labelled as copies.

136
00:14:56,520 --> 00:15:07,160
So we we had all four combinations within one group, but critically, no person in a single group saw the same image twice.

137
00:15:07,180 --> 00:15:13,930
We thought that was very, very important because people have such good memory for having seen a portrait recently.

138
00:15:14,440 --> 00:15:17,720
Then to show it again with a different label would be pretty meaningless.

139
00:15:17,740 --> 00:15:26,320
So we've got this crossover design whereby we've got seven participants who've seen all the 50 images under one attribution.

140
00:15:26,620 --> 00:15:33,280
And the other seven participants seen the images under the directly opposite attribution.

141
00:15:34,660 --> 00:15:37,690
Now just a little bit of science about what we're going to do.

142
00:15:37,720 --> 00:15:44,010
We're going to measure their brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging.

143
00:15:44,020 --> 00:15:50,560
I'll say a little bit more about that towards the end. But we are in this map here of size of things.

144
00:15:50,890 --> 00:15:56,260
So that's one millimetre ten millimetres, 100 millimetres, 1000 millimetres.

145
00:15:56,780 --> 00:16:07,059
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,

146
00:16:07,060 --> 00:16:16,520
if you're lucky. And it's got a time resolution of about well, in our hands about five or 6 seconds.

147
00:16:16,930 --> 00:16:20,110
So it takes a little while to measure these responses.

148
00:16:20,980 --> 00:16:27,490
They're actually blood flow responses we're going to look at. But they are related to neural activity.

149
00:16:28,830 --> 00:16:32,160
And here is in detail what we did. We had our two groups here.

150
00:16:32,190 --> 00:16:38,040
Group one. Group two. Here they are looking at the same portrayed in group one.

151
00:16:38,040 --> 00:16:43,260
There we hear an auditory signal instruction that this is authentic.

152
00:16:43,530 --> 00:16:47,670
So the people in group one, when they see this portrait, they will be told it's authentic.

153
00:16:48,210 --> 00:16:53,310
In Group two, same portrait, but they will have been told that it's a copy.

154
00:16:54,090 --> 00:16:59,610
And so it goes on for all the 50 and the group with different attributions for Group one and Group two.

155
00:17:01,470 --> 00:17:08,610
And we also included actually here a few just scrambled pictures.

156
00:17:08,610 --> 00:17:14,759
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.

157
00:17:14,760 --> 00:17:19,770
So first thing we looked at is could we actually pick out the genuinely authentic ones

158
00:17:19,980 --> 00:17:25,800
and the genuine copies simply based on measuring what was going on inside the head?

159
00:17:26,850 --> 00:17:35,549
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.

160
00:17:35,550 --> 00:17:39,330
We couldn't do it. I'm afraid we are still poor, academic, so on that.

161
00:17:39,330 --> 00:17:50,520
So the authentic and the copy Rembrandts creating pretty much the same basic brain activations in relation to the visual content.

162
00:17:51,570 --> 00:18:01,140
However, when we do instruction, a copy instruction versus an authentic instruction for the same picture and we compare,

163
00:18:01,350 --> 00:18:05,940
you know, activation when we call it a copy compared with activation,

164
00:18:05,940 --> 00:18:07,320
when we call it authentic,

165
00:18:07,650 --> 00:18:18,780
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.

166
00:18:19,950 --> 00:18:23,249
And these are sad statistics.

167
00:18:23,250 --> 00:18:29,610
So the standard deviations, so these are quite significant activations in different parts of the brain.

168
00:18:30,720 --> 00:18:34,620
And similarly, there's one significant spot here, blue,

169
00:18:35,310 --> 00:18:43,170
which is actually more activated when you receive the instruction that it's authentic as opposed to whether it's a copy.

170
00:18:44,380 --> 00:18:50,980
And I'm going to begin with that the the interpretation of that one, because that's kind of interesting.

171
00:18:51,220 --> 00:19:00,610
This area, the orbitofrontal cortex. It was first identified as being associated with a primary reward.

172
00:19:00,940 --> 00:19:09,550
If you have a nice tasting drink or a sweet food or something, then it lights up.

173
00:19:10,210 --> 00:19:14,420
It's also actually interestingly excited by a win in a gambling task.

174
00:19:14,430 --> 00:19:21,010
If you put someone in the brain scanner and measure their brain responses as you set them a gambling task.

175
00:19:21,250 --> 00:19:24,400
And orbitofrontal cortex lights up with a win. So.

176
00:19:25,480 --> 00:19:30,190
It's telling us that actually artwork as signed as authentic a signed is

177
00:19:30,190 --> 00:19:36,099
authentic actually by that measure of activation seems to have a higher value,

178
00:19:36,100 --> 00:19:40,510
high net value. It it releases those reward mechanisms in the brain.

179
00:19:42,340 --> 00:19:47,800
Actually the copy results are much more interesting if we just get back to them first.

180
00:19:47,810 --> 00:19:52,690
There's a lot more activations and as I'm going to show you, there's a complexity to them.

181
00:19:53,560 --> 00:19:58,600
Copy introduces quite a lot more activation in different areas.

182
00:19:58,930 --> 00:20:06,520
And when we asked our participants after they come out of the scanner, well, well, you know what was going on?

183
00:20:07,210 --> 00:20:09,100
They said, well, we were puzzling a lot more.

184
00:20:09,100 --> 00:20:14,650
We were looking at these and we were looking at saying to ourselves, well, how do they you know, what made that a fake?

185
00:20:15,790 --> 00:20:21,730
And immediately there's this engagement with this issue about what is it about this picture that is a fake?

186
00:20:25,050 --> 00:20:29,850
Here is another part of the complexity which I'll take you through.

187
00:20:30,480 --> 00:20:36,240
We saw that there was some activity right up in the front of the brain, right in the frontal cortex here.

188
00:20:36,540 --> 00:20:40,590
And what we plot the degree of activity in the frontal cortex.

189
00:20:42,250 --> 00:20:53,860
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,

190
00:20:54,280 --> 00:21:02,020
there's really not much relationship between the activity in the visual cortex and the activity in the frontal cortex.

191
00:21:02,840 --> 00:21:07,790
However, when we tell them it was a copy, there's quite a lot of co activation.

192
00:21:07,790 --> 00:21:14,720
That is to say when frontal cortex activation goes high, so does occipital cortex activation.

193
00:21:16,620 --> 00:21:26,340
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.

194
00:21:27,660 --> 00:21:34,559
Now that is consistent with a view that the as it were, the thinking reasoning part of the brain,

195
00:21:34,560 --> 00:21:41,280
which is primarily is the frontal cortex and is the part that is greatly expanded in us compared with other animals.

196
00:21:41,580 --> 00:21:48,960
That is the one which is actually communicating with the visual cortex and contributing to

197
00:21:49,800 --> 00:21:56,910
that extra activity that we see when we tell them that it's this puzzle puzzling copy item.

198
00:21:57,870 --> 00:22:02,190
Now, we don't know the direction of the interaction. In truth, from this, it's just a correlation.

199
00:22:02,370 --> 00:22:10,410
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.

200
00:22:11,350 --> 00:22:18,100
So authenticity. Sure enough, it's just one element of the aesthetic experience, but it's a significant one.

201
00:22:19,110 --> 00:22:28,170
No single brain area involved. We've identified at least three and we in particular we changed the interactions between brain areas when

202
00:22:28,470 --> 00:22:36,810
we tell people it's a copy and if you like and this is what Martin Kemp immediately left to a royal,

203
00:22:36,810 --> 00:22:41,100
this supports the arts scholars view. I don't think there's some justification for this.

204
00:22:41,790 --> 00:22:48,540
Aesthetic judgements are multifaceted and multidimensional, and even in this limited paradigm of just looking at authenticity,

205
00:22:48,810 --> 00:22:53,400
it's brain where brain areas working together that count not a single sight.

206
00:22:53,730 --> 00:22:59,220
That is the, as it were, the seat of the soul and the soul's judgement about this.

207
00:23:01,330 --> 00:23:07,750
I just wanted to just push this a little bit. Conscious that I shouldn't really take more than a few more minutes, but.

208
00:23:09,710 --> 00:23:14,570
Just wanted to talk about these activations because these are images in themselves

209
00:23:15,170 --> 00:23:19,490
and I think we need to reflect on what those images are actually telling us.

210
00:23:19,790 --> 00:23:24,739
I mentioned previously that these are activations due to blood flow through

211
00:23:24,740 --> 00:23:29,059
the brain and this is actually the activation just due to the finger tapping.

212
00:23:29,060 --> 00:23:32,420
So if you just do this. All this.

213
00:23:33,790 --> 00:23:39,760
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.

214
00:23:39,910 --> 00:23:46,870
So we're looking at the localisation or the most active bits due to that very, very simple task here.

215
00:23:47,140 --> 00:23:56,170
And we're looking at a three dimensional space and these are then projected out into these different projections of the brain activity.

216
00:23:58,040 --> 00:24:01,040
Let me remind you that we're here in this part of the space.

217
00:24:02,390 --> 00:24:06,380
Uh, this is one second 4 seconds of activity.

218
00:24:07,220 --> 00:24:15,830
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.

219
00:24:16,580 --> 00:24:26,080
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.

220
00:24:27,110 --> 00:24:29,840
So that's that's one way in which this is quite deceptive.

221
00:24:30,110 --> 00:24:37,280
He's probably fine for what we're doing because people tend to spend a good while looking at pictures anyway.

222
00:24:37,730 --> 00:24:43,790
But there are different parts of this space which are being completely unexplored.

223
00:24:44,120 --> 00:24:49,880
When you look with functional brain imaging, that's that's one message I want to take home.

224
00:24:50,390 --> 00:24:58,340
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.

225
00:24:58,350 --> 00:25:04,880
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.

226
00:25:05,150 --> 00:25:12,290
And you don't have a single site of activation and you can hold into this kind of thing and concentrate on that.

227
00:25:12,530 --> 00:25:16,700
But actually, you've excluded some of these other interesting things that are happening.

228
00:25:19,490 --> 00:25:26,780
And finally, this is the very simple diagram that's tongue in cheek of the relationship.

229
00:25:27,560 --> 00:25:32,770
Between activation of a nerve cell and activation of blood flow.

230
00:25:32,780 --> 00:25:39,800
So we've got here the nervous system. And the nervous system is protected by a blood brain barrier.

231
00:25:40,930 --> 00:25:46,600
And blood flows through here through artillery arterials into capillaries.

232
00:25:46,900 --> 00:25:50,230
What we actually measure with our MRI machine is happening out here.

233
00:25:50,890 --> 00:25:55,300
What's actually doing the work is a cell like this in here, which is a nerve cell.

234
00:25:55,630 --> 00:26:05,020
And there's a little bit in between with multiple different pathways which cause the link between this activation,

235
00:26:05,410 --> 00:26:10,240
which we think is the the thinking part of the brain and this activation here.

236
00:26:10,870 --> 00:26:14,110
We don't really think that our blood, although that's what we're actually measuring.

237
00:26:14,710 --> 00:26:21,070
And equally, when we look at patches of the brain, we have to remember the connectivity that the brain has internally.

238
00:26:21,250 --> 00:26:24,430
And these are some of the connections from the brain stem here.

239
00:26:24,790 --> 00:26:34,060
The two hemispheres joined. They are quite different than simply those slices of tissue that you looked at earlier.

240
00:26:34,090 --> 00:26:37,450
So there are multiple different points into this.

241
00:26:38,170 --> 00:26:46,390
So I'm going to finish with the following. And some of you may know what this is a very recent project.

242
00:26:46,780 --> 00:26:51,460
Google had a project to extract the essence of Rembrandt,

243
00:26:52,180 --> 00:27:03,250
and they gave their Google deep learning system lots of Rembrandt portraits and then said, Make me a new wolf.

244
00:27:05,330 --> 00:27:09,390
And this is what it came up with. They didn't just do that.

245
00:27:09,410 --> 00:27:17,030
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.

246
00:27:17,330 --> 00:27:25,910
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.

247
00:27:26,300 --> 00:27:32,560
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.

248
00:27:34,320 --> 00:27:37,980
And then they said something really interesting, which I think will be worth talking about.

249
00:27:38,370 --> 00:27:45,270
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.

250
00:27:45,450 --> 00:27:50,700
And I think it's probably just the beginning. So I think I will stop there and we can have further discussion.

251
00:27:57,560 --> 00:27:58,820
Well, thank you very much, Adam.

252
00:27:58,970 --> 00:28:09,710
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.

253
00:28:10,190 --> 00:28:16,870
She lectures in the digital arts multimedia design and is contributing research Associate Vice Trends

254
00:28:16,880 --> 00:28:22,580
Technology Research at the Marie Curie funded NOVA Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Tennessee.

255
00:28:23,780 --> 00:28:25,880
She's trained, solution focussed team therapist.

256
00:28:26,660 --> 00:28:32,690
Her current practice research project explores the use of hypnosis and guided visualisation within contemporary

257
00:28:32,690 --> 00:28:37,700
art practice and the construction of these practices within a wider historical and cultural context.

258
00:28:38,300 --> 00:28:43,790
And today she's going to give us a talk and titled I had a slightly different kind of exhibit.

259
00:28:45,620 --> 00:28:52,220
At one point it was called Nail Biting. Time is about a dissertation versus just like some.

260
00:28:55,250 --> 00:28:58,430
So just to introduce myself and what I do a little bit more,

261
00:28:58,760 --> 00:29:03,440
I'm predominantly an artist researcher and I've been making work for the last couple of

262
00:29:03,440 --> 00:29:11,150
years that seeks to explore the idea of using the imagination as a medium for arts practice.

263
00:29:11,930 --> 00:29:16,580
I'll explain what some of the work that I've been making that does that actually entails.

264
00:29:17,090 --> 00:29:24,050
During my talk I'm going to read, so hopefully try and stay conscious.

265
00:29:25,670 --> 00:29:31,370
Just I don't go for a tangent because everything that I want to talk about is so exciting.

266
00:29:31,730 --> 00:29:39,680
So, okay. In 2004, Bruno Latour suggested the very success of critical approaches to knowledge construction,

267
00:29:40,010 --> 00:29:42,680
such as those practised in the sociology of science,

268
00:29:43,070 --> 00:29:50,810
have resulted in a generalised and widespread scepticism about facts, but now pervades popular as well as academic culture.

269
00:29:51,140 --> 00:29:56,300
And I think Michael Gove's point supports this.

270
00:29:57,590 --> 00:30:01,370
He notes that his next door neighbour in his village in France thinks that

271
00:30:01,370 --> 00:30:05,540
he is naive for believing that the twin towers were destroyed by terrorists.

272
00:30:07,880 --> 00:30:15,830
Let was also worried about the way in which the climate change debate is being sidelined or interfered with by people who say,

273
00:30:15,830 --> 00:30:22,880
Well, we can't take any facts and they use the social arguments from sociology of science to kind of undermined,

274
00:30:23,360 --> 00:30:33,170
undermine the idea that there's a closed book on whether or not human based climate change is a real problem and solving ourselves.

275
00:30:33,200 --> 00:30:37,430
Collection of essays believed in imaginings. The narrative construction of reality.

276
00:30:38,000 --> 00:30:43,730
Psychologists Call Sheep discusses the problem of authenticity in the context of contemporary life.

277
00:30:44,990 --> 00:30:47,780
The problem of authenticity is of high importance.

278
00:30:48,020 --> 00:30:55,010
If beliefs about the world and about ourselves are derived from some remote source, as most of our beliefs are.

279
00:30:55,730 --> 00:31:00,650
We do not, in general speak with God or Jesus, nor even have converse with Freud.

280
00:31:01,220 --> 00:31:08,450
Rather, virtually all of our contact with the Earth sources in our lives is mediated by replicas copies of materials.

281
00:31:10,190 --> 00:31:14,780
At the same time as our access to an authentic world of facts is called into question.

282
00:31:15,170 --> 00:31:23,840
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,

283
00:31:24,200 --> 00:31:29,659
and with the loss of God's guarantee that we could at least be the first object that we can believe.

284
00:31:29,660 --> 00:31:38,510
The first object that we think Cartesian scepticism has left us equally bereft of facts when examining the world through our own senses.

285
00:31:43,750 --> 00:31:47,830
So what I'll talk about today are some attempts to get to some other sources,

286
00:31:48,280 --> 00:31:52,240
the way in which people wilfully interpret certain aspects of their mental experience

287
00:31:52,540 --> 00:31:57,040
in order to give their own imaginative worlds a sense of authority and authenticity.

288
00:31:58,060 --> 00:32:03,820
I'm interested in the way that people modulate their experience and the cultural ideas and behaviours that allow them to do so.

289
00:32:04,360 --> 00:32:11,530
And this is a complex matter. And how on a mass scale use 2012 essay learning spirit possession.

290
00:32:12,040 --> 00:32:19,720
They point out the need for an ethnographic for ethnographic accounts of possession to pay attention to what happens prior to possession.

291
00:32:20,350 --> 00:32:25,089
The difficulty with generating a full ethnographic account is partly an issue, they say,

292
00:32:25,090 --> 00:32:30,940
because possession involves a diffuse learning dispersed in various aspects of human existence.

293
00:32:31,720 --> 00:32:39,160
The process of learning processes of learning are in many respects obscure the possessed and not supposed to learn anything.

294
00:32:39,250 --> 00:32:43,450
Instead, they come to experience possession as something alien to their own will.

295
00:32:43,720 --> 00:32:51,250
A Largely out of control knowledge of spirit possession is therefore implicit and nonverbal.

296
00:32:51,580 --> 00:32:56,860
An access by a kind of diffuse learning anthropologist may only build a satisfactory,

297
00:32:57,160 --> 00:33:03,700
satisfying account of it if they take into account the everyday actions and interactions that communicate complex,

298
00:33:03,700 --> 00:33:10,660
symbolic and embodied realities of possession or in the case of institutionalised executive and accepted possession,

299
00:33:11,140 --> 00:33:16,240
the anthropologist must gain privileges access to the codes in which formal, formal training takes place.

300
00:33:18,160 --> 00:33:22,090
They point out that understanding possession requires an account of cognition that

301
00:33:22,090 --> 00:33:28,390
recognises that it can allow humans to creatively develop as particular kinds of persons.

302
00:33:29,860 --> 00:33:33,160
That cognition should be considered constructive and generative.

303
00:33:34,270 --> 00:33:39,610
Like all like all social processes. Learning possession is an open ended process,

304
00:33:39,820 --> 00:33:48,700
and expertise is not just about matching cultural expectations with bodily states and perceptual skills, but also learning to play up with them.

305
00:33:50,470 --> 00:33:56,709
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

306
00:33:56,710 --> 00:34:05,470
how they perceive and more specifically where they believe that those perceptions are coming from an apparent quest for authentic sources.

307
00:34:06,400 --> 00:34:11,260
Along the way, we will see some of how lawyers diffuse learning, which takes a whole range of forms,

308
00:34:11,560 --> 00:34:16,480
expectancy and demand characteristics, visual culture and popular imaginaries,

309
00:34:16,810 --> 00:34:19,240
implicit memories for embodied experience,

310
00:34:19,720 --> 00:34:27,640
and also the narrative ization of things of experiences to fit cultural ideas as well as and perhaps crucial.

311
00:34:27,640 --> 00:34:33,160
From my perspective, this creative impulse noted by Halloween and the miscue,

312
00:34:34,810 --> 00:34:39,850
I'm going to focus on two examples of the cultural mediation of spontaneous imagination

313
00:34:40,150 --> 00:34:44,049
and the way in which effortless or spontaneous experience is sought out and made.

314
00:34:44,050 --> 00:34:50,200
Use of these practices have similar similar similarities with the executive or sought out spirit

315
00:34:50,200 --> 00:34:56,440
possession as they involve an intentional shifting of agency to external or internal other causes.

316
00:34:56,980 --> 00:35:01,950
I want to talk about the work that goes into and the methods by which these effects are arrived at.

317
00:35:02,950 --> 00:35:09,400
The reason being that I'm an artist who seeks to understand how the imagination can be used as a material for arts practice.

318
00:35:09,730 --> 00:35:16,240
So I'm going to show you quickly, let me show you my Web page.

319
00:35:16,690 --> 00:35:20,650
So there's four pieces of work here that I made last year.

320
00:35:21,010 --> 00:35:32,739
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,

321
00:35:32,740 --> 00:35:38,200
this person is at its most basic as a kind of material thing that you can do stuff with.

322
00:35:38,350 --> 00:35:43,110
What do we you know, if we think about imagination, if it's a kind of clay or something like, well,

323
00:35:43,330 --> 00:35:47,950
how does that I find that useful to orient me as somebody who might want to try and do something to change,

324
00:35:47,950 --> 00:35:50,980
something to to produce some kind of effect within.

325
00:35:52,540 --> 00:36:02,139
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,

326
00:36:02,140 --> 00:36:07,000
where he talks about the idea of things as being coalescence of immaterial

327
00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:14,230
and material concerns that cross over a number of cultural and material and,

328
00:36:14,320 --> 00:36:19,090
and embodied and psychological and biological and physiological boundaries.

329
00:36:20,800 --> 00:36:29,570
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.

330
00:36:30,530 --> 00:36:37,459
I basically told people I made them agree with me that they would describe a dream

331
00:36:37,460 --> 00:36:42,530
holiday to Cyprus in return for the opportunity to win a dream holiday to Cyprus.

332
00:36:43,340 --> 00:36:48,140
What I did was I actually gave them a lottery scratchcard that allowed them to win up to £10,000.

333
00:36:48,440 --> 00:36:53,390
But in order to get that opportunity, they had to describe to me in great detail what that holiday would be like.

334
00:36:54,950 --> 00:37:01,820
And I was interested simply I live on a street in Plymouth that has lots of palm trees on it.

335
00:37:02,720 --> 00:37:07,880
You know, I'm close to the English Riviera and lots of scratch cards in the gutter blowing in the wind.

336
00:37:08,180 --> 00:37:13,340
And there was something about this kind of idea of the scratchcard as a kind of fun,

337
00:37:14,150 --> 00:37:19,219
a door to a fantastical place or the door to an opportunity that doesn't that

338
00:37:19,220 --> 00:37:30,230
might not exist as a kind of engine for dreaming or a portal of some kind.

339
00:37:30,500 --> 00:37:36,170
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.

340
00:37:36,170 --> 00:37:39,350
So I sort of find out a bit about what people thought about it before I went.

341
00:37:39,650 --> 00:37:50,060
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.

342
00:37:50,330 --> 00:37:51,540
I will buy your dreams.

343
00:37:51,560 --> 00:38:03,770
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.

344
00:38:03,770 --> 00:38:07,130
So it looks like real money. It has very high denominations. It's very beautiful.

345
00:38:07,940 --> 00:38:12,810
And I got people to relate dreams to me and and paid for them.

346
00:38:12,830 --> 00:38:19,790
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.

347
00:38:20,660 --> 00:38:22,520
I have sold some of the dreams on as well.

348
00:38:23,570 --> 00:38:30,740
This place, Nicosia, Oasis, Old City Tarot, was a set of tarot cards that I drew while in Nicosia last year.

349
00:38:31,400 --> 00:38:37,879
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.

350
00:38:37,880 --> 00:38:46,940
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.

351
00:38:47,300 --> 00:38:52,010
And so I decided to go around looking for things that seem symbolic and sketch them.

352
00:38:52,010 --> 00:38:56,120
And then somehow I ended up doing a tower readings for people with them.

353
00:38:56,420 --> 00:39:01,639
But because I didn't know what these things meant, because it wasn't, I didn't know this place.

354
00:39:01,640 --> 00:39:05,420
So I got people to tell me what they thought the cards meant when they got the cards.

355
00:39:05,720 --> 00:39:09,260
So I kind of crowdsourced the symbolic meaning of the statues.

356
00:39:09,530 --> 00:39:17,030
Some really interesting things came up. The the frappe card represents procrastination because people go out and drink it in the sun.

357
00:39:17,660 --> 00:39:24,559
But actually, I found out that an employee of Nestlé at a trade show didn't have any hot water one day,

358
00:39:24,560 --> 00:39:31,130
so he shook the Nestlé coffee over ice and discovered this new drink.

359
00:39:31,370 --> 00:39:35,180
So. So it means procrastination. But don't don't stop.

360
00:39:35,780 --> 00:39:42,140
Try and find a way through. So they will have these nice kind of meetings and that partly about Cypriot culture.

361
00:39:42,710 --> 00:39:45,590
Finally, I've already gone off on a tangent.

362
00:39:46,010 --> 00:39:53,989
Finally, I made this piece called Nova Santos, The Island of New Science and Nova Scientist uses a guided dreaming protocol,

363
00:39:53,990 --> 00:40:01,970
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.

364
00:40:02,960 --> 00:40:08,900
There's more backstory to this, but that's the key thing in this work for the moment.

365
00:40:10,100 --> 00:40:14,510
So what then? So I also trained as a.

366
00:40:19,410 --> 00:40:22,889
So in the same time, I was thinking about using hypnosis to make art work.

367
00:40:22,890 --> 00:40:25,770
And my first idea regarding this was, wait, why?

368
00:40:25,770 --> 00:40:32,610
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.

369
00:40:33,330 --> 00:40:37,150
And then the second question is, is this a real thing? Can I actually do this?

370
00:40:37,170 --> 00:40:41,760
What can you do with it? And that was kind of one of my underlying research questions is what can you do with it?

371
00:40:43,590 --> 00:40:52,860
And so all of the work I've shown you hasn't used is you use one technique in Nova Santos.

372
00:40:52,860 --> 00:40:56,549
That is the kind of thing that you come across in and in hypnotherapy.

373
00:40:56,550 --> 00:41:03,480
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.

374
00:41:04,260 --> 00:41:10,920
But I'll talk about that another time. So within any arts practice, hypnotism represents opportunities and problems.

375
00:41:11,310 --> 00:41:16,020
It confers authority on the practitioner, but raises endless accompanying spectres,

376
00:41:16,320 --> 00:41:22,980
not to mention legal medical issues regarding what it is understood to be and what is it is understood to do.

377
00:41:23,430 --> 00:41:29,880
Hypnotism is a complex and evolving cultural practice made up of making it made up of various different activities.

378
00:41:30,150 --> 00:41:34,110
Visualisation. Perceptual tricks. Time lying down with your eyes.

379
00:41:34,110 --> 00:41:37,380
Shots and these things more or less hang together.

380
00:41:37,920 --> 00:41:44,220
So it's a thing in Bruner literal sense as well, a group of concerns crossing disciplinary and ontological boundaries.

381
00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:49,050
The contemporary view is that at its centre, hypnotism is about imagination.

382
00:41:49,530 --> 00:41:54,870
Kersh set out to find it as a procedure during which changes in sensations, perceptions,

383
00:41:55,080 --> 00:42:01,050
thoughts, feelings or behaviour of suggested help guards review of induction procedures.

384
00:42:01,260 --> 00:42:08,280
That's the ritual that you perform in order to put someone into hypnosis so that they can take a huge range of forms.

385
00:42:08,520 --> 00:42:17,100
Anything from placebo tablets, injections of water, suggestions of sleep, suggestions, feel excited, anything.

386
00:42:17,850 --> 00:42:22,410
And they argue that there's very little that defines the form of the actual hypnotic experience,

387
00:42:22,680 --> 00:42:30,360
apart from engagement with imaginative suggestion, acting as if and the resulting changes in physiological and mental states that accompany it.

388
00:42:31,830 --> 00:42:36,180
However, what informs the imagination of the hypnosis hypnotic?

389
00:42:37,080 --> 00:42:46,290
In the 1950s, psychologist Martin Owen. Owen coined the term demand characteristics which characterise the broad and implicit expectations

390
00:42:46,290 --> 00:42:52,050
hold held by a subject about what was expected of them in the context of a psychological experiment.

391
00:42:52,230 --> 00:43:00,570
And he saw these as potentially confounding expectations or argued that the psychological he was also doing research and hypnosis.

392
00:43:00,870 --> 00:43:06,089
Research, psychological laboratory could be seen as a hypnotic context in which test subjects were

393
00:43:06,090 --> 00:43:10,770
highly suggestible clients and apparently behaved in a fashion that they would not otherwise.

394
00:43:11,140 --> 00:43:17,990
I've recently read someone questioning just how trustworthy his work was,

395
00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:23,400
so I don't know how good his claims were actually on the subject of authenticity and trust.

396
00:43:25,020 --> 00:43:31,890
So one demand characteristic that seems to seems to forever dogged hypnotism is the association with loss of volition.

397
00:43:32,340 --> 00:43:37,530
And and hypnotism is often used to imagine agency differently.

398
00:43:39,480 --> 00:43:43,080
So I have an example here. Close this.

399
00:43:50,700 --> 00:43:58,559
Oh. So this is the first training that I did was in stage hypnosis with Jonathan Chase, who's the archetypal stage hypnotist.

400
00:43:58,560 --> 00:44:03,150
I think you'll agree. Don't look in his eyes. So.

401
00:44:04,950 --> 00:44:13,710
So here we have some examples of discrepancies of the Internet in YouTube, but showing people demonstrating arm,

402
00:44:13,730 --> 00:44:18,629
arm, cattle, APC, which is a form of it's understood to be a motor movement.

403
00:44:18,630 --> 00:44:22,650
So when you think about making a certain movement, you often unconsciously move in that manner.

404
00:44:23,430 --> 00:44:29,850
And so this is one of the things that still used quite a lot by hypnotherapist and stage hypnotists.

405
00:44:32,790 --> 00:44:41,430
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,

406
00:44:41,760 --> 00:44:51,200
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.

407
00:44:51,210 --> 00:44:57,840
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,

408
00:44:57,840 --> 00:45:04,800
all these different things that we imagine. So we can pretend that we're under control, someone else's control.

409
00:45:08,660 --> 00:45:13,460
So looking, but looking at the visual culture and gestures associated with hypnosis and mesmerism,

410
00:45:13,670 --> 00:45:21,740
we can quickly assemble a collage that demonstrates a pervasive and embodied understanding of influence and control and its historical representation.

411
00:45:22,100 --> 00:45:25,430
So some of these are images of hypnosis.

412
00:45:25,730 --> 00:45:32,090
There's actually an exorcism here. I think this is an engraving.

413
00:45:32,360 --> 00:45:37,910
I think this is meant to be mesmerising. One of my senses, I think.

414
00:45:39,350 --> 00:45:45,890
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.

415
00:45:45,920 --> 00:45:55,540
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.

416
00:45:55,550 --> 00:46:00,080
We have this gesture very much the arms raised over another person,

417
00:46:00,080 --> 00:46:07,160
the exerting of power that comes all the way through for the church from mesmerism all the way up to the present day.

418
00:46:07,190 --> 00:46:13,010
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.

419
00:46:13,700 --> 00:46:22,879
And the same with the hypnotic subject. But we get these lines of force actually even continue in graphical representations of hypnotism.

420
00:46:22,880 --> 00:46:25,910
You know, this there's something going on here.

421
00:46:26,180 --> 00:46:35,959
And what I'm saying is these images a you know, here in the popular consciousness, though, they're you know,

422
00:46:35,960 --> 00:46:39,770
I'm sure as soon as I said the word hypnotism, people thought of Derren Brown, for example.

423
00:46:39,770 --> 00:46:48,230
So another current of influence is the way in which hypnotism has been traditionally used in psychotherapy to access the unconscious,

424
00:46:48,590 --> 00:46:53,510
in particular repressed trauma considered a legitimate form of therapeutic practice.

425
00:46:53,510 --> 00:47:01,550
Until the 1990s, it became apparent fear in a series of successful lawsuits against American therapists.

426
00:47:01,880 --> 00:47:05,960
They were all American perps. And this happened in America mainly,

427
00:47:06,800 --> 00:47:13,940
who were unwittingly encouraging their clients to develop dissociative identity disorder and false memories of traumatic experiences.

428
00:47:19,040 --> 00:47:27,830
Rivera and Sullivan have studied the prevalence of these associations of dissociative identity disorder with mental illnesses such as depression,

429
00:47:28,130 --> 00:47:33,320
and show that the idea that these things are related to one another continue to provide that

430
00:47:33,320 --> 00:47:37,880
the popular consciousness and hypnotism as well as a kind of suggestion feeds into that.

431
00:47:39,410 --> 00:47:44,180
So the most compelling moments of the artistic experiments I've made were moments

432
00:47:44,180 --> 00:47:48,920
of spontaneity in the scratchcard performances and in I Will Buy Your Dreams.

433
00:47:49,310 --> 00:47:53,630
Participants seemed to demonstrate a level of self-awareness. They second guess themselves.

434
00:47:53,900 --> 00:47:58,880
They were apologising and tentative, and their responses and stories seemed well rehearsed.

435
00:48:00,410 --> 00:48:06,410
People told me dreams that they clearly told to people before, and that they were willing to and ready to let go of.

436
00:48:07,130 --> 00:48:13,160
People's responses were very different to the guided dreaming of Nova Santos, and I think this was key.

437
00:48:13,160 --> 00:48:16,640
The key aspect to this was the use of something called a process suggestion.

438
00:48:16,970 --> 00:48:19,940
And I'll give you an example now.

439
00:48:23,440 --> 00:48:31,630
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.

440
00:48:31,900 --> 00:48:36,220
It could be a place of your past or your present or your future. But it's your place and your place only.

441
00:48:37,000 --> 00:48:41,650
And that's a place where you can feel really glad that you found yourself in.

442
00:48:42,130 --> 00:48:49,630
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.

443
00:48:53,320 --> 00:49:01,750
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.

444
00:49:01,750 --> 00:49:06,850
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,

445
00:49:06,850 --> 00:49:09,910
you know, thinking of some lovely place, hopefully had it.

446
00:49:11,440 --> 00:49:18,970
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.

447
00:49:19,330 --> 00:49:22,350
And people are often very excited to report their experiences.

448
00:49:22,360 --> 00:49:28,720
They're often really interesting and sometimes confused about what I did and didn't tell them to imagine.

449
00:49:28,840 --> 00:49:32,200
They'll ask, Did you say it was sunny or did I just imagine that?

450
00:49:33,010 --> 00:49:36,669
Well, the content of process suggestions that the right role arrives in the mind is usually

451
00:49:36,670 --> 00:49:42,130
interpreted as being far from the unconscious and therefore authentically bears.

452
00:49:43,850 --> 00:49:52,890
So the process, just the content of process suggestions that arrive in the mind are usually interpreted as being from the unconscious sorry,

453
00:49:53,260 --> 00:49:59,530
and therefore authentically bears. But at the same time, the fact that they appear on the hypnosis adds another layer.

454
00:49:59,710 --> 00:50:06,100
Framing them as involuntary and other the hypnotic instructional to allow something to just comes to mind

455
00:50:06,100 --> 00:50:12,250
promotes a tendency to allow the mind to wander and to generate imagery in a way that feels kind of authentic.

456
00:50:14,170 --> 00:50:17,110
There's also a particular quality to the content of these suggestions,

457
00:50:17,110 --> 00:50:22,090
and in Hitman three foot therapy that they used to treat phobias and bad habits.

458
00:50:22,780 --> 00:50:26,890
A technique that is referred to by Jonathan Chase as a magic bullet.

459
00:50:29,470 --> 00:50:35,830
There's an element of conjuring that gives these spontaneous experiences a sense of veracity that can appear seemingly magical.

460
00:50:36,160 --> 00:50:41,350
And a typical example comes from an acquaintance who I hypnotised to stop biting his nails under hypnosis.

461
00:50:41,350 --> 00:50:44,080
I asked him to generate a symbol that would stand for the habit.

462
00:50:44,680 --> 00:50:49,150
He later told me, and he was quite perplexed about this, that the symbol for his nail biting was a tiger.

463
00:50:50,080 --> 00:50:55,390
And when we discussed it further, he told me he bit his nails when he was angry and he made this gesture.

464
00:50:57,490 --> 00:51:01,060
So these kinds of tidy symbols have turned up a lot in my practice,

465
00:51:01,570 --> 00:51:05,680
and I've spent plenty of time questioning whether or not it's just the intelligence of

466
00:51:05,680 --> 00:51:09,580
people figuring out why they make sense rather than them actually making any sense.

467
00:51:10,390 --> 00:51:13,390
But why wouldn't human beings as intelligent, problem solving,

468
00:51:13,390 --> 00:51:19,990
walking biographies not be able to reach for meaningful pointers, if not magic bullets that might shed light on a problem?

469
00:51:20,770 --> 00:51:29,290
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,

470
00:51:29,590 --> 00:51:35,590
a form of non-reflective ideation, a form of knowledge, experience that appears directly in the mind.

471
00:51:36,640 --> 00:51:38,020
He describes the scheme of us.

472
00:51:38,680 --> 00:51:46,360
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.

473
00:51:46,900 --> 00:51:51,520
The symbolic image appears first when the subject makes the effort of comprehension

474
00:51:51,850 --> 00:51:55,600
and the subject would decipher this image and find in it just the meaning.

475
00:51:55,600 --> 00:52:02,680
Sort and uninformed observer cannot comprehend a symbolic schema if he is shown a sketch of it without explanation.

476
00:52:04,330 --> 00:52:09,250
Now Evan Thompson talks about the cognitive science studies of sleep onset,

477
00:52:10,270 --> 00:52:15,970
particularly hitting go shapes, forms and impressions that appear to people on the edge of sleep.

478
00:52:16,300 --> 00:52:20,740
And he suggests that imagery of this type is actually associated with the integration of

479
00:52:20,740 --> 00:52:26,710
procedural and implicit memory and that memory being brought into existing knowledge.

480
00:52:27,130 --> 00:52:39,640
So procedural memory is memory of activities, behaviours and movements and these kind of doing things, memories.

481
00:52:40,310 --> 00:52:47,740
It's probably people here who could do a better job of this rather than declarative memory, which is facts and information.

482
00:52:48,370 --> 00:52:51,640
So it's implicit is unconscious memory, procedural memory.

483
00:52:53,080 --> 00:52:54,400
So we actually run.

484
00:52:54,640 --> 00:53:01,420
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.

485
00:53:01,640 --> 00:53:09,010
And a really high number of of the people that they then woke up repeatedly had images of Tetris blocks in their minds.

486
00:53:09,370 --> 00:53:17,170
So we're rehearsing what we the tasks that we've been doing and learning continue about that.

487
00:53:18,160 --> 00:53:25,930
So regardless of the value of how these images actually relate to the content of experiences,

488
00:53:26,170 --> 00:53:30,760
they are easily woven into understanding of magically appearing insights into the self.

489
00:53:33,100 --> 00:53:37,330
There were many other examples of in culture rooted practices that involve shifts of volition

490
00:53:37,570 --> 00:53:42,310
or the attribution of the content of spontaneous thoughts or dreams to other entities.

491
00:53:42,970 --> 00:53:52,060
For example, Team Lerman's Anthropological Study of the way in which members of the Vineyard an evangelical revivalist church in the United States.

492
00:53:52,640 --> 00:53:56,240
Learn through social interactions, study metaphor and diary,

493
00:53:56,240 --> 00:54:03,890
keeping to monitor their own inner thought processes and mental images in a way that allows them to hear God talking back to them.

494
00:54:05,330 --> 00:54:08,450
She describes her experience in the church.

495
00:54:08,450 --> 00:54:14,899
Thus you are asked to experience some of your thoughts of being as being more like perceptions in a church like the Vineyard.

496
00:54:14,900 --> 00:54:19,850
God participates in your mind and you hear what He says as if it were external speech.

497
00:54:20,450 --> 00:54:23,720
The general model is clear enough. God wants to be your friend.

498
00:54:24,140 --> 00:54:28,550
You develop that relationship through prayer. Prayer is hard work and requires effort and training.

499
00:54:28,820 --> 00:54:30,260
And when you develop that relationship,

500
00:54:30,260 --> 00:54:36,350
God will answer back through thoughts and mental images He places in your mind and through sensations he causes in your body.

501
00:54:37,070 --> 00:54:40,370
You still experience those thoughts and images and sensations for the most part,

502
00:54:40,640 --> 00:54:43,880
as if they were your own generated from within your own mind and body.

503
00:54:44,300 --> 00:54:50,900
But you have to learn to experience those you have identified as God's is different than even these

504
00:54:50,900 --> 00:54:56,000
evangelical Christians that not only have to accept the basic idea that they can experience God directly,

505
00:54:56,360 --> 00:55:03,680
but they must develop the interpretative tools to do so in a way that they can authentically experience what feels like inner thought

506
00:55:03,950 --> 00:55:13,430
as God generated through an effortful shifting of attribution and an attention to the involuntary and spontaneous mental events,

507
00:55:13,850 --> 00:55:20,389
the elusive, unreal and fantastical information takes on authority for members of the Vineyard.

508
00:55:20,390 --> 00:55:25,610
Authenticity is a hard won quality of experience and paradoxically almost diametrically

509
00:55:25,610 --> 00:55:30,180
opposed the kinds of authenticity we might associate with the physical given real.

510
00:55:31,250 --> 00:55:37,040
They are supported by the culture and ways of talking within the church and the way in which other congregants,

511
00:55:37,040 --> 00:55:44,779
for further along the process describe and record their own experiences in diaries and guidebooks.

512
00:55:44,780 --> 00:55:49,880
And this kind of belief and interpretation is built up in collaboration with others.

513
00:55:50,510 --> 00:55:56,600
Does anyone keeping a note of the time for. What's so interesting?

514
00:55:57,170 --> 00:56:04,400
Yes. I've got one more question. Okay. So I'm just going to finish with a thought that I couldn't leave out.

515
00:56:05,240 --> 00:56:08,930
In his book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism.

516
00:56:09,350 --> 00:56:16,460
Colin Campbell proposed the idea that modern consumerism is associated with something called he calls self illusory hedonism,

517
00:56:17,180 --> 00:56:22,340
a cultural experience that has its roots in Romanticist media, such as the model, the novel.

518
00:56:23,450 --> 00:56:32,570
And he says that practices like behaviours like daydreaming are actually more satisfying to us than, than real hedonistic experiences.

519
00:56:32,900 --> 00:56:40,430
And that contemporary culture is filled with types of media that train us to be able to experience

520
00:56:40,730 --> 00:56:46,790
hedonistic and self-directed fantasies that aren't interfered with by the annoying aspects of real life.

521
00:56:48,380 --> 00:56:53,780
And I just I'd like to quote just like from the end of his book, because it's quite fantastic.

522
00:56:54,020 --> 00:56:59,329
There are problems, I think, with some of his work, but so longing and permanent, unfocused dissatisfaction,

523
00:56:59,330 --> 00:57:05,060
a complimentary features of that distinctive outlook generated by self illusory hedonism.

524
00:57:05,630 --> 00:57:10,160
And both can be said to be the inevitable consequences of the practice of daydreaming.

525
00:57:10,880 --> 00:57:17,150
For no matter how far individuals attempt to exercise restraint over their individualist pursuit of imaginary pleasure,

526
00:57:17,780 --> 00:57:25,130
either in order to pay greater attention to the extent agencies of reality or to prevent the development of extravagant fantasies.

527
00:57:25,880 --> 00:57:29,390
There is a sense in which this would always be left to light.

528
00:57:30,260 --> 00:57:34,790
It would be too late because they will have already eaten off the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Dreams.

529
00:57:35,240 --> 00:57:40,010
That is, they will have lived that particular slice of unreal life and sample its delights.

530
00:57:40,670 --> 00:57:48,470
That is, they will with the consequence, whether they wish it or not, the actuality will now be judged by its standards.

531
00:57:49,580 --> 00:57:54,950
To this extent, daydreaming makes an irreversible difference to the way people feel about the life they lead.

532
00:57:55,550 --> 00:58:03,170
And I guess my my speculation is really that the people who are practising

533
00:58:03,170 --> 00:58:09,410
these different kind of activities are making use of of an existing capacity.

534
00:58:09,570 --> 00:58:18,140
That's part of our culture and perhaps one that's not about it's not something about delusion,

535
00:58:18,740 --> 00:58:28,520
but an active and creative use or desire to put to place an authenticity and and value on those imaginings.

536
00:58:30,840 --> 00:58:36,200
If so, what I've discussed might seem to be about the way that people delude themselves.

537
00:58:36,200 --> 00:58:39,650
But if we take into account the pleasure of the imaginary that Campbell points to,

538
00:58:40,250 --> 00:58:47,630
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.

539
00:58:48,290 --> 00:58:54,230
Perhaps in this play of agency, instead of giving up our control, people are in some ways taking something back.

540
00:58:55,850 --> 00:59:09,430
I'm going to stop. So what someone asked me to do was someone sent me, Andres,

541
00:59:09,460 --> 00:59:14,460
that the paper the described the experiment that Andrew was just telling me, telling us about,

542
00:59:15,370 --> 00:59:22,149
and asked me to think across from that to how authenticity might figure in initially writing and indeed writing in general,

543
00:59:22,150 --> 00:59:30,130
and indeed the kinds of writing that I do and we all do academic writing and fiction and the interface between them.

544
00:59:30,280 --> 00:59:37,990
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.

545
00:59:39,040 --> 00:59:46,180
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.

546
00:59:47,190 --> 00:59:52,030
That when you're looking at it, when those experimental subjects were looking at the copies, they were really looking at them.

547
00:59:52,630 --> 00:59:56,290
Whereas when they were looking at the original. Thomas Yeah, yeah, exactly.

548
00:59:56,290 --> 01:00:00,759
Yeah. Actually, something I wondered about was, you know, they're all in a sense, they're all copies, aren't they?

549
01:00:00,760 --> 01:00:07,570
Because they're digital image images, which connects to something I'm going to be saying about, you know, printed books in a minute.

550
01:00:08,410 --> 01:00:11,799
So I want to start from that detail of the work that Andrew has presented.

551
01:00:11,800 --> 01:00:12,850
The surprising result,

552
01:00:12,850 --> 01:00:19,870
the surprising result of the images that were able copies provokes more brain activity than the images that were labelled originals.

553
01:00:19,870 --> 01:00:27,819
And that's perhaps a surprise because of exactly because of that high value that Western culture places on originals,

554
01:00:27,820 --> 01:00:31,540
although it does it does kind of chime with what it's like in that room where the Mona Lisa is,

555
01:00:31,540 --> 01:00:34,239
which is to say that very many people are in the presence of the Mona Lisa,

556
01:00:34,240 --> 01:00:39,880
but not very many people are actually are actually, you know, studying it and in great detail.

557
01:00:40,960 --> 01:00:47,950
But what I think the thing I want to take and think across the literature with is the point that the

558
01:00:47,950 --> 01:00:54,340
context in which the viewing is done is important in determining what kind of viewing the viewing is.

559
01:00:54,580 --> 01:00:59,680
So looking at an image can be many different activities and the same is true.

560
01:01:01,150 --> 01:01:04,600
So I'm just I thought it would be best to. Okay, yeah.

561
01:01:04,610 --> 01:01:08,560
So the way the experiment was set up implicitly asked the question.

562
01:01:08,830 --> 01:01:13,930
So the way in which copies, you know, in our culture we typically encounter copies isn't in that way.

563
01:01:14,860 --> 01:01:19,540
But these experimental subjects were by being shown a series of images and told that some

564
01:01:19,540 --> 01:01:22,960
of them were copies and some of them were originals that implicitly set up a question.

565
01:01:23,200 --> 01:01:27,429
And so the way in which they responded to this distinction that was being presented to

566
01:01:27,430 --> 01:01:35,110
them was determined partly by the context in which the viewing was being asked to be done.

567
01:01:35,620 --> 01:01:39,279
You know, and more usually in our culture, you go to an art gallery and you see originals.

568
01:01:39,280 --> 01:01:44,409
There isn't a copy to compare them to, or you're reading an artwork and it's all picture,

569
01:01:44,410 --> 01:01:47,860
you know, it's all photographs of paintings and then on originals to compare them to.

570
01:01:48,160 --> 01:01:52,060
So there isn't that, you know, implicit question created by the viewing situation.

571
01:01:53,170 --> 01:01:58,809
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.

572
01:01:58,810 --> 01:02:01,570
An image can be many different activities and the same is true of reading.

573
01:02:02,050 --> 01:02:06,550
You know, you can read something in an intensely analytical way as when you're doing a piece of literary criticism about it.

574
01:02:06,910 --> 01:02:10,600
You read something for fun, you can scan a text for the information it gives you and so on.

575
01:02:10,600 --> 01:02:15,580
Different text, different kinds of text are designed to prompt different reading practices.

576
01:02:15,850 --> 01:02:22,090
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.

577
01:02:22,270 --> 01:02:29,590
You can scan a novel for sociological information, but it's more usual to read it in an imaginatively involved way.

578
01:02:29,740 --> 01:02:31,120
Now, this is well known, of course,

579
01:02:31,120 --> 01:02:39,639
and the word for the interrelation between what texts are like and the reading practice they ask for is genre and all.

580
01:02:39,640 --> 01:02:45,490
I want to point out by saying this is that a way of describing what happened in the experiment about a

581
01:02:45,490 --> 01:02:51,970
description of originality and descriptions of being a copy is that it gave different genre prompts,

582
01:02:52,840 --> 01:02:58,990
attach different descriptions of genre to the different kinds of images, and this prompted different genres of response.

583
01:02:59,380 --> 01:03:03,010
And one thought arising from this is that I wonder if it might be interesting to look at whether

584
01:03:03,010 --> 01:03:07,630
different readers of whether different genres of reading might show up in the same way,

585
01:03:07,840 --> 01:03:12,340
whether it's possible to see the difference between, say, reading an instruction manual and reading a novel and reading a poem.

586
01:03:12,640 --> 01:03:14,170
And perhaps this has been done already. I don't know.

587
01:03:14,170 --> 01:03:19,150
This really is a genuinely interdisciplinary seminar in that I know nothing about the brain and Andrew's field at all.

588
01:03:21,130 --> 01:03:28,240
So in literature and with writing in general, the relationship between original and copy is not the same as in the visual arts.

589
01:03:28,600 --> 01:03:31,659
With books, the distinction of original form copy disintegrates.

590
01:03:31,660 --> 01:03:37,480
All books are copies, and therefore all books are originals, with perhaps an exception, which I'll come to in a minute.

591
01:03:38,410 --> 01:03:41,470
Of course, there are such things as books with antiquarian value.

592
01:03:41,510 --> 01:03:47,760
You know, Shakespeare First Folio can go for nearly £3 million, which is almost you know, you can always get a painting for that.

593
01:03:48,610 --> 01:03:53,319
But they're not originals in the sense that a Van Gogh painting might be or an original Rembrandt might be.

594
01:03:53,320 --> 01:03:59,920
You know, they're not unique. Well, you know, a Shakespeare scholar would say that each.

595
01:04:00,150 --> 01:04:07,800
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.

596
01:04:08,730 --> 01:04:14,430
And of course, there are manuscripts which are like authentic paintings, and that they come direct from the hand of the creator.

597
01:04:15,120 --> 01:04:20,010
But they're also not like authentic paintings, because in print culture, at least, they're usually not the finished work.

598
01:04:20,550 --> 01:04:28,270
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.

599
01:04:28,270 --> 01:04:34,020
So in a in a manuscript culture or in say, for instance,

600
01:04:34,020 --> 01:04:40,470
some hand finished and hand illustrated books by William Blake say when confronted with that kind of book,

601
01:04:40,710 --> 01:04:45,480
we feel we're moving out of the realm of literature towards the realm of the visual arts.

602
01:04:46,230 --> 01:04:49,050
With literature, the original is inherently also a copy.

603
01:04:50,160 --> 01:04:56,700
And incidentally, this is why the massive anarchy of copying, which is the Internet, poses a great threat to the regime of regulated copying,

604
01:04:56,700 --> 01:05:00,710
which is the publishing industry, and does not pose a similar threat to art galleries.

605
01:05:01,140 --> 01:05:03,120
You know, you're still experiencing Middlemarch,

606
01:05:03,540 --> 01:05:07,950
whether you're reading it in a first edition or a penguin classic or on, you know, on your screen from Gutenberg.

607
01:05:08,550 --> 01:05:14,340
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.

608
01:05:14,970 --> 01:05:22,860
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.

609
01:05:26,680 --> 01:05:35,270
Um. Right. This means that the notion of authenticity is harder to pin down in literature than the visual arts.

610
01:05:37,640 --> 01:05:40,880
It necessarily includes a larger dose of metaphor.

611
01:05:41,990 --> 01:05:45,470
In the visual arts, there is a solid central meaning of the word authentic.

612
01:05:45,620 --> 01:05:53,300
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.

613
01:05:53,570 --> 01:05:57,230
Indeed, this is an authentic Dickens novel would be a slightly odd thing to say.

614
01:05:58,190 --> 01:06:04,320
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.

615
01:06:05,390 --> 01:06:12,590
What is at stake in those questions of authenticity is somewhat different from what is at stake with a painting in literature

616
01:06:12,590 --> 01:06:18,110
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.

617
01:06:18,710 --> 01:06:25,610
For instance, the 18th century English poet Thomas Chatterton published poems which he pretended were by an imaginary 15th century poet Thomas Rowley,

618
01:06:26,870 --> 01:06:32,810
or in the 1980s, a children's author, an Anglican priest, Toby Ford, pretended to be a young Asian woman.

619
01:06:32,960 --> 01:06:39,770
Raheel Khan, writing stories that were read out on radio for ascribe to that fake author real name and published by Virago

620
01:06:40,670 --> 01:06:46,760
and then had to be withdrawn when the the truth of their origin the facts about their origin came out.

621
01:06:47,720 --> 01:06:53,660
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,

622
01:06:53,660 --> 01:07:01,250
fiction or partly fictional infamous instances here of the American Misery memoir by James Frey published 2003,

623
01:07:01,640 --> 01:07:07,310
which turned out to include a lot of exaggeration and fabrication with the result that the author was confronted and humiliated on Oprah,

624
01:07:08,390 --> 01:07:14,330
or a 1997 book by Misha de Fonseca, first written in English but best known in a French first version.

625
01:07:14,330 --> 01:07:19,940
Sylvie Lulu Surviving with Wolves, which was made into a film which turned out to be completely fictional.

626
01:07:21,260 --> 01:07:27,200
Now, these cases, cases like these are complicated by the fact that the pretence of being something

627
01:07:27,200 --> 01:07:30,980
that it's not is a very prominent element of literary writing in general,

628
01:07:31,160 --> 01:07:36,980
and it manifests itself in many guises. The subtitle of Jane Eyre is an autobiography.

629
01:07:37,880 --> 01:07:43,040
It's not an autobiography. Don Quixote is presented as being translated from an Arabic source.

630
01:07:43,580 --> 01:07:45,350
It's not translated from an Arabic source.

631
01:07:46,370 --> 01:07:52,040
Writers can write under pseudonyms, and there's an obvious continuity between this and the established tactics of narrative,

632
01:07:52,050 --> 01:07:59,450
such as adopting a narrative voice and the structuring of texts. As soon as you're using language, you're introducing shapes and biases.

633
01:07:59,450 --> 01:08:07,220
You're making something. And the distinction between making and making up is tricky, indeed impossible to pin down.

634
01:08:08,450 --> 01:08:14,479
Now, one reaction to this complex scenario is to adopt a trite version of postmodernism, to say that because everything is text,

635
01:08:14,480 --> 01:08:19,040
everything is inauthentic, and we shouldn't really be using shouldn't really be worrying about this word authentic anymore.

636
01:08:19,280 --> 01:08:22,760
It's been found out as an old fashioned conspiracy.

637
01:08:24,110 --> 01:08:26,989
And this is a line that you still see peddled by, say,

638
01:08:26,990 --> 01:08:34,880
Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley in the guise of the chronological institute or whatever they call themselves.

639
01:08:35,390 --> 01:08:40,060
For instance, in a declaration of inauthenticity, which is a kind of knockabout fun.

640
01:08:41,060 --> 01:08:47,660
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.

641
01:08:48,170 --> 01:08:51,319
Degrees of credence. Degrees of trust. All the time.

642
01:08:51,320 --> 01:08:56,060
When we encounter language with gauging what kind of language it is and how to take it.

643
01:08:56,740 --> 01:09:00,030
And sometimes people enjoy being played within their suspects, you know,

644
01:09:00,050 --> 01:09:05,840
in lots and lots of fictional instances, scandals like the fake case and the Fonseka case,

645
01:09:06,350 --> 01:09:13,459
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.

646
01:09:13,460 --> 01:09:22,670
So that so there's a general question about what kind of writing it is that we negotiate the whole time.

647
01:09:22,970 --> 01:09:26,630
And one of the things that literary writing can do is kind of play with that, tease us about that.

648
01:09:26,930 --> 01:09:37,070
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.

649
01:09:37,400 --> 01:09:44,570
But they they make people feel duped. They do it in a way that people feel they you know, people you know,

650
01:09:44,990 --> 01:09:50,660
people feel I've been tricked in thinking about this and thinking about where to draw distinctions here.

651
01:09:51,170 --> 01:09:57,140
I find I'm helped by some of the formulations in David Shields, his book, Reality, Hunger, A Manifesto from 2010.

652
01:09:58,430 --> 01:10:02,120
So Shield says, for instance, it's a series. It's a kind of gathering of aphorisms.

653
01:10:02,120 --> 01:10:05,569
And there are a couple of quotations on the handout I put around this gathering of aphorisms,

654
01:10:05,570 --> 01:10:13,490
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.

655
01:10:13,940 --> 01:10:20,630
I know all the moments are moments staged and theatrical shaped and thematic.

656
01:10:21,560 --> 01:10:25,290
Nevertheless, Shields proposes, you know, so that getting rid of a kind of surplus.

657
01:10:25,390 --> 01:10:30,430
That notion of the authentic as not being staged nevertheless feels proposes.

658
01:10:30,430 --> 01:10:40,270
We can still think in terms of gradations of authenticity or a kind of an endeavour towards something that will be accepted as authentic.

659
01:10:41,560 --> 01:10:45,850
So in the case of autobiography and memoir, which is necessarily always shaped, as I've said,

660
01:10:45,850 --> 01:10:53,709
necessarily always to an extent fictional Shield says what the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade

661
01:10:53,710 --> 01:11:01,870
him or her that the narrator is trying as honestly as possible to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.

662
01:11:03,370 --> 01:11:08,800
Actually, I'm I'm a bit uneasy about that word, honestly, there.

663
01:11:09,130 --> 01:11:11,530
It's a little bit simple the way it appears in that sentence.

664
01:11:12,520 --> 01:11:17,650
But I think the thing to realise here is that because this is one statement among many that are gathered together,

665
01:11:17,890 --> 01:11:23,350
each somewhat at odds with the ones around it in the surrounding text,

666
01:11:23,350 --> 01:11:30,010
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.

667
01:11:30,790 --> 01:11:35,410
And those questions are at least raised in other other texts around it.

668
01:11:36,250 --> 01:11:43,720
But what I want to take from this is the sense of authenticity as a mode of endeavour

669
01:11:44,080 --> 01:11:48,430
and the sense of an endeavour towards authenticity as asking to be shared.

670
01:11:48,730 --> 01:11:51,310
You know, the ability to persuade someone.

671
01:11:53,020 --> 01:12:00,100
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.

672
01:12:01,180 --> 01:12:03,790
If we take authenticity in writing as an endeavour,

673
01:12:03,790 --> 01:12:10,660
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.

674
01:12:12,140 --> 01:12:16,300
One of the things I like about this way of putting it is that it's transferable to other contexts.

675
01:12:16,550 --> 01:12:21,730
You know, how can we talk about authenticity in an academic paper, say, you know, well,

676
01:12:21,850 --> 01:12:25,659
a feeling that something is at stake for the person writing or giving it perhaps,

677
01:12:25,660 --> 01:12:30,250
and a corresponding claim on the attention of the people reading or listening.

678
01:12:31,660 --> 01:12:38,380
Now, I'm going to say something briefly now about translation before coming back to this piece of memoir or autobiography fiction,

679
01:12:38,590 --> 01:12:44,500
which I'm trying to work on at the moment. Translations are often treated as copies.

680
01:12:46,360 --> 01:12:52,839
So this is coming back to when I was talking, saying about how all printed books are copies, equally copies.

681
01:12:52,840 --> 01:13:01,180
And I was saying, you know, there might be an exception. I think translations are sometimes too often treated as a kind of exception.

682
01:13:03,730 --> 01:13:10,690
Actually, the thing about under your experiment in which everything you were showing was a digital image,

683
01:13:11,560 --> 01:13:18,550
and yet nonetheless the description copy versus the description original was still felt to have meaning.

684
01:13:18,580 --> 01:13:23,290
I mean, nobody said I don't know if anybody had said, but, you know, this seems not to be insignificant.

685
01:13:23,290 --> 01:13:27,610
Anyone saying I simply they're all copies. It's just simply that distinction has no meaning.

686
01:13:28,870 --> 01:13:34,630
So the way translations relate to other printed books is a bit like that, I feel.

687
01:13:36,580 --> 01:13:41,860
Translations are then, you know, even though all books are in a sense copies,

688
01:13:41,860 --> 01:13:45,490
there's a way in which translations are singled out and treated as particularly copies.

689
01:13:47,050 --> 01:13:52,330
And if you think about actually the word original and the where the word original

690
01:13:52,330 --> 01:13:56,020
tends to or is still allowed to appear in critical discourse these days,

691
01:13:56,380 --> 01:14:02,530
it's often in discussions of translations, which is to say, as soon as you're talking about a translation,

692
01:14:03,190 --> 01:14:07,120
there's a tendency then to compare it against something that gets defined as the original.

693
01:14:07,810 --> 01:14:11,830
But if you're just reading a book you don't think I'm reading, look at me, I'm reading the original.

694
01:14:11,860 --> 01:14:15,999
You know, it's only in the context of comparison with the translation that the word original

695
01:14:16,000 --> 01:14:21,100
tends to offer itself when a translation is corrected against the source,

696
01:14:21,100 --> 01:14:27,970
for instance, in a school translation exercise. Translation is being treated as a copy in legal or political frameworks.

697
01:14:28,150 --> 01:14:32,470
Translations, for instance, of international treaties can function as copies.

698
01:14:33,790 --> 01:14:37,269
But what's revealing, I think, about both these cases is that in both of them,

699
01:14:37,270 --> 01:14:42,820
there's clearly a strong regulatory framework by which the idea of the copy is maintained.

700
01:14:43,510 --> 01:14:48,190
School translations are done with a particular aim and marked against specific criteria.

701
01:14:49,000 --> 01:14:58,150
Translations of treaties are anchored in an international institutional interpretive structure which determines how they can be used.

702
01:14:58,630 --> 01:15:04,740
So it takes a lot of effort to, in fact, to hold a translation to the idea of a copy, you know,

703
01:15:04,750 --> 01:15:12,399
because translations are obviously different from their sources in all sorts of ways and in freer contexts like literary translation,

704
01:15:12,400 --> 01:15:14,770
we can see and accept this fact.

705
01:15:14,770 --> 01:15:22,420
You know, the translations are always importantly different, often interestingly different, both from their sources and from one another.

706
01:15:23,260 --> 01:15:29,970
So. The regime of the copy very markedly doesn't fit this sort of translation.

707
01:15:30,810 --> 01:15:38,969
And this is what there's a lot more that could be said about this coming from the direction of translation studies.

708
01:15:38,970 --> 01:15:44,760
But that the single point I want to make about it that's relevant in our context is that I think

709
01:15:44,760 --> 01:15:50,309
the word authenticity can be helpful in doing justice to the interpretive and imaginative work,

710
01:15:50,310 --> 01:15:56,550
which is always part of translation, at least when it's done by humans and is especially part of literary translation.

711
01:15:57,630 --> 01:16:03,120
Here we need to ask what is the thing that's being that we feel is being translated?

712
01:16:03,330 --> 01:16:10,710
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?

713
01:16:11,310 --> 01:16:17,600
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.

714
01:16:17,610 --> 01:16:24,210
Simply there in the source text, they have to be collaboratively brought into being by a process of reading and imagining.

715
01:16:24,990 --> 01:16:31,710
In translating, you have to bring into being the sense of the text, which you then try to re realise in other words,

716
01:16:32,100 --> 01:16:36,030
and the lines between reading and noticing and finding other words.

717
01:16:36,030 --> 01:16:39,150
The borders between these processes are fuzzy and shifting.

718
01:16:39,930 --> 01:16:43,889
And that's why in translation there'll always be different translations of the same source,

719
01:16:43,890 --> 01:16:47,340
which you can't adjudicate between on the basis of accuracy.

720
01:16:47,340 --> 01:16:52,739
You can't adjudicate between them as copies. Now on the sheet, next thing on the sheet,

721
01:16:52,740 --> 01:16:58,709
last thing on the sheet is a bit of testimony about this from an interview in The Guardian with Michael Hoffman.

722
01:16:58,710 --> 01:17:05,850
He's a really brilliant translator. So the interview says one of his guiding principles for translating is to avoid the obvious word,

723
01:17:06,390 --> 01:17:08,430
even if it is the literal equivalent of the original.

724
01:17:09,270 --> 01:17:13,880
In the second paragraph of Hopkins version of Metamorphosis, Greg or Sam so doesn't ask what happened to me.

725
01:17:13,890 --> 01:17:17,430
Vast miscommunication, but what's the matter with me?

726
01:17:18,480 --> 01:17:23,100
Hoffman Lie the word he says because it sounds like someone having trouble getting up after having died.

727
01:17:24,990 --> 01:17:28,590
So Hoffman aware of the obvious words, things.

728
01:17:28,590 --> 01:17:38,999
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.

729
01:17:39,000 --> 01:17:49,950
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.

730
01:17:51,240 --> 01:17:58,170
Then the whole thing will appear. Automotive. Look, it's running on English rather than limping after the German.

731
01:17:58,350 --> 01:18:00,299
Now, I don't really like that word automotive there.

732
01:18:00,300 --> 01:18:05,550
I think it undersells what's happening because he likes the joke and I think it undersells what's happening.

733
01:18:06,210 --> 01:18:17,610
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.

734
01:18:18,780 --> 01:18:27,420
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.

735
01:18:28,770 --> 01:18:36,970
When the translation has when you is has a style of this kind, you can trust that the translator has been a man,

736
01:18:37,000 --> 01:18:41,490
or at least you can trust the translation asks for a kind of trust in you.

737
01:18:41,970 --> 01:18:47,820
It asks to be considered. Perhaps this is something that we can perhaps reach for the word authenticity to help us think about.

738
01:18:48,120 --> 01:18:57,150
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.

739
01:18:58,080 --> 01:19:04,270
I want to carry across this idea that an endeavour of style or perhaps voice.

740
01:19:04,560 --> 01:19:10,140
I don't really like the word voice, but it's a word that people use in this context and form.

741
01:19:11,160 --> 01:19:19,800
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.

742
01:19:20,700 --> 01:19:32,370
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.

743
01:19:33,720 --> 01:19:37,620
And I've been struggling this because in the memoir ish thing that I'm in the process of writing,

744
01:19:37,620 --> 01:19:47,040
which I'm finding very difficult, I found that when what I'm writing finds a form or offers itself as formed.

745
01:19:47,670 --> 01:19:49,920
And this is where I feel there's a connection with what Hannah was saying.

746
01:19:50,940 --> 01:19:56,490
I feel that it is grounded and has something that I could almost use the word authenticity about.

747
01:19:57,360 --> 01:20:02,940
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.

748
01:20:03,930 --> 01:20:09,989
And the reason for this so this seems to me a little bit like actually that structure of process suggestion that you were describing,

749
01:20:09,990 --> 01:20:14,309
which is to say that when I feel that a structure is emerging from me,

750
01:20:14,310 --> 01:20:22,290
that I'm not choosing to have emerge, that feels like a kind of a kind of guarantor in a way.

751
01:20:23,100 --> 01:20:26,749
And obviously that's a sign of an interrelation between the imagination and the unconscious.

752
01:20:26,750 --> 01:20:30,390
So that connects to the kind of theme of these seminars.

753
01:20:31,410 --> 01:20:37,200
Now, this feeling has some kinship with what often happens in writing something fictional

754
01:20:37,980 --> 01:20:42,120
when the story takes on its own momentum or the characters take on a life of their own.

755
01:20:42,120 --> 01:20:44,640
And lots of people sort of obviously testify to that feeling.

756
01:20:46,230 --> 01:20:51,150
But what I feel is the difference between the feeling I have about this memoir and that kind

757
01:20:51,150 --> 01:20:57,540
of commonly felt feeling about fiction is that is that when it happens in fiction writing,

758
01:20:58,530 --> 01:21:04,650
that thing of the characters taking on their own life is the sign of a successfully conjured fictional world, perhaps.

759
01:21:05,730 --> 01:21:13,110
Whereas, in this memoir I'm writing, I want the memoir to be anchored, in fact, and I want every fact to be true.

760
01:21:13,140 --> 01:21:16,469
So I'm not happy with saying it's the same kind of thing,

761
01:21:16,470 --> 01:21:22,770
because I feel that when you're writing fiction, that feeling is a sort of release into fiction ality.

762
01:21:23,310 --> 01:21:32,310
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.

763
01:21:32,310 --> 01:21:34,020
I want to feel that it's all testimony.

764
01:21:34,920 --> 01:21:42,990
But on the other hand, because on the other hand, form is is obviously to some extent in conflict with that ambition,

765
01:21:43,410 --> 01:21:50,730
because as soon as something is manifestly formed, it's manifestly pulling away from a genre of, you know, factual reporting.

766
01:21:51,780 --> 01:21:55,400
I mean, that's why we don't have a category fiction for poetry. And I'm prose.

767
01:21:55,410 --> 01:22:00,299
It's important to have the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. But we don't talk about this being a fictional life.

768
01:22:00,300 --> 01:22:08,850
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.

769
01:22:13,480 --> 01:22:17,010
Okay. So in this context of the memoir.

770
01:22:20,280 --> 01:22:26,700
What I feel that form manifests is my own little bit of originality, as Hoffman would say,

771
01:22:27,390 --> 01:22:32,070
a little bit of boldness, a sign that I'm trying to get to the bottom of an experience.

772
01:22:32,850 --> 01:22:37,200
So I suppose the translation model kind of roughly and again, I'm not completely happy with this,

773
01:22:37,200 --> 01:22:46,350
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.

774
01:22:47,070 --> 01:22:58,080
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,

775
01:22:58,080 --> 01:23:05,220
as it were, allowing a form to emerge, has some kinship with what Hoffman was talking about in his translation practice.

776
01:23:07,650 --> 01:23:16,710
Another thing that I find formal patterns do is help different kinds of language to be brought into conjunction and weighed out.

777
01:23:17,910 --> 01:23:22,230
And I feel that this too, becomes part of an attempt to get to the bottom of something.

778
01:23:22,440 --> 01:23:25,290
And I'm just going to read because I feel I have no choice.

779
01:23:25,290 --> 01:23:28,470
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.

780
01:23:30,300 --> 01:23:34,170
And I do just want to read one bit, but then I felt it wouldn't make sense without one before it.

781
01:23:35,220 --> 01:23:36,660
And the couple of bits I'm about to read,

782
01:23:36,660 --> 01:23:44,610
you'll see that we move through some institutional language and then there's a protest against it, which takes the form of metaphor.

783
01:23:45,030 --> 01:23:52,799
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,

784
01:23:52,800 --> 01:23:57,180
which again is metaphor and in fact rhymes with the first moment of protest.

785
01:23:57,540 --> 01:24:02,120
And I'm only realising this because I thought, okay, what on earth can I offer up in this seminar?

786
01:24:02,130 --> 01:24:06,900
I didn't think this before I wrote them. I just sort of I just wrote them.

787
01:24:06,900 --> 01:24:12,300
And now I'm just sort of wondering how they might how they might connect to this this context.

788
01:24:13,530 --> 01:24:16,829
And I guess what's happening with these different kinds of writing brought into

789
01:24:16,830 --> 01:24:20,790
relation through a formal structure is that I feel the way that different kinds

790
01:24:20,790 --> 01:24:25,169
of writing are arranged triangulate to project the possibility of a position

791
01:24:25,170 --> 01:24:29,850
beyond any one of these languages from which they can be appraised or weighed up.

792
01:24:30,690 --> 01:24:35,700
And I feel that that is the thing that stakes makes a claim to authenticity,

793
01:24:36,030 --> 01:24:43,020
which is to say that if I were to offer a narrative or comment about the kind of thing I'm writing about,

794
01:24:43,440 --> 01:24:48,270
I would be too much giving myself over to a language and there would be a loss of authenticity in that.

795
01:24:48,690 --> 01:24:55,740
Whereas I feel that when different modes of description are juxtaposed and there's a position

796
01:24:56,730 --> 01:25:02,820
that sort of this and they project a position that stands outside any of those languages,

797
01:25:03,270 --> 01:25:09,360
that feels like something I can offer up to be perceived as authentic.

798
01:25:10,500 --> 01:25:14,190
Okay, the context is there really nasty bits as well.

799
01:25:16,530 --> 01:25:21,179
The context of this is an accident that happened to my mother. She fell down stairs.

800
01:25:21,180 --> 01:25:24,450
She's elderly lady. She fell down stairs and broke many bones, broke many vertebrae.

801
01:25:25,380 --> 01:25:30,720
But she was fundamentally okay in the hospital. She was fundamentally okay because her spinal cord wasn't damaged.

802
01:25:30,720 --> 01:25:33,840
So she was going to get better. And then that night in the hospital on the ward,

803
01:25:33,840 --> 01:25:40,560
she was allowed to fall out of bed because she was deranged and that rendered her quadriplegic completely paralysed.

804
01:25:41,520 --> 01:25:46,110
So that was a horrible incident. And so what I'm kind of struggling to find a way of writing about that.

805
01:25:46,110 --> 01:25:50,130
Among that, there are kind of happy bits in the in the book.

806
01:25:51,900 --> 01:25:58,050
So this is and these are the two sections that kind of focus on trying to find a way of saying something about that.

807
01:25:59,670 --> 01:26:04,190
The hospital said when it rang in the middle of the night that my mother had fallen from her hospital bed to the floor,

808
01:26:04,200 --> 01:26:08,819
but it wasn't anything serious. The scan had been done and there was no extra damage to bones or spine.

809
01:26:08,820 --> 01:26:10,500
Though she did have a little cut in her forehand.

810
01:26:12,300 --> 01:26:18,000
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.

811
01:26:19,470 --> 01:26:24,900
The hospital said some weeks further down the line that my mother might well regain control of her arms,

812
01:26:25,320 --> 01:26:28,650
but sadly, probably not her fingers all the same.

813
01:26:29,130 --> 01:26:32,250
A period of specialist rehab at Stoke Mandeville could do a great deal.

814
01:26:32,250 --> 01:26:40,219
It was a wonderful program. The hospital said later still that my mother no longer had the cognitive ability to benefit

815
01:26:40,220 --> 01:26:44,830
from Specialist Rehab at Stoke Mandeville or anywhere else she could not remember.

816
01:26:44,840 --> 01:26:50,810
So she could not learn. She would never be able to manage clever eye tracking devices or passive operated switches.

817
01:26:51,650 --> 01:26:58,130
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.

818
01:26:58,520 --> 01:27:05,060
The never say never. The hospital said change is always possible, but probably not in this case.

819
01:27:05,240 --> 01:27:07,700
The hospital said, no, probably not.

820
01:27:09,650 --> 01:27:18,020
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,

821
01:27:18,020 --> 01:27:25,490
warmth and individuality and feeling, whose bodies were capable of movement and sensation, and whose minds possessed full cognitive ability.

822
01:27:26,920 --> 01:27:31,810
Which is the cruellest way of killing hope, mildew or the size.

823
01:27:33,680 --> 01:27:37,970
Next time. This is the room where. What happened to my mother really happened.

824
01:27:38,810 --> 01:27:42,620
This is the room where a nurse turned her back and walked out, leaving my mother alone.

825
01:27:43,370 --> 01:27:49,160
This is the room where only a few minutes earlier, I too had turned my back and walked out, leaving my mother alone.

826
01:27:49,490 --> 01:27:53,540
It was so high up, so technological, so clean.

827
01:27:54,410 --> 01:27:57,200
There was a strip of windows all the way from one wall to another,

828
01:27:57,530 --> 01:28:05,359
and through them you could see floating distant lights of apartment blocks and offices and flowing distant lines of cars and beyond them,

829
01:28:05,360 --> 01:28:08,870
some amber studded hills. And above them, the winking stars.

830
01:28:10,160 --> 01:28:15,319
There. She lay on a high up cot in a cluster of attentive machines.

831
01:28:15,320 --> 01:28:19,760
Quiet, asleep, tranquillised, anaesthetised.

832
01:28:19,820 --> 01:28:23,930
Embalmed. Or so I thought. Swaddled in expertise.

833
01:28:25,460 --> 01:28:30,230
And yet after I turned my back and walked out and after the nurse had turned her back and walked out,

834
01:28:30,260 --> 01:28:33,500
leaving my mother alone, she opened her eyes and moved.

835
01:28:34,340 --> 01:28:40,340
Despite her broken pelvis and broken ribs and broken collarbone and fractured vertebrae and fractured skull and severe concussion.

836
01:28:40,490 --> 01:28:47,270
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.

837
01:28:47,660 --> 01:28:51,200
She rolled Hollywood herself up and tipped.

838
01:28:51,890 --> 01:28:54,920
This is the room that put a dent in her forehead the size of an oyster.

839
01:28:55,700 --> 01:28:59,180
This is the room that put multiple modules of gas in her spinal canal.

840
01:28:59,960 --> 01:29:04,010
This is the room that gave her mid cervical into spine as ligament injury and

841
01:29:04,010 --> 01:29:09,230
an acute traumatic cord injury of see 4 to 5 as she encountered the floor.

842
01:29:10,040 --> 01:29:13,040
The floor as hard as a hammer, as smooth as a knife.

843
01:29:15,070 --> 01:29:20,590
Okay. So I'm just going to. So that's that's what I found myself writing and I can say more about it.

844
01:29:20,590 --> 01:29:27,549
So one of the things that interest me, for instance, is that this is the I realise we've realised a few days later,

845
01:29:27,550 --> 01:29:30,400
you know, there's that Auden poem, this is a nightmare crossing the border.

846
01:29:31,120 --> 01:29:37,330
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.

847
01:29:37,660 --> 01:29:47,080
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.

848
01:29:47,410 --> 01:29:58,750
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.

849
01:30:01,000 --> 01:30:04,700
Yeah. Um, I don't have any conclusions, but thank you.