1 00:00:05,310 --> 00:00:15,000 Okay. Well, welcome to the last torch seminar in the in the series before it moves off to California next next year. 2 00:00:16,200 --> 00:00:19,019 I feel very honoured to be to be hosting you today. 3 00:00:19,020 --> 00:00:27,270 And we have two amazing guests, Sue on Heart, the founder and convenor of the of the torch program here and and Danny Freud. 4 00:00:28,380 --> 00:00:32,340 So let me tell you a little bit about what's going to happen. 5 00:00:33,120 --> 00:00:40,709 We're going to have a 30 minute talk from Salon. Then there'll be a short break to help ourselves to some some drinks. 6 00:00:40,710 --> 00:00:43,380 And then we'll have Annie Freud get her talk. 7 00:00:43,380 --> 00:00:52,920 And we can then have a discussion at the end of the two sessions more open and allowing ourselves to discuss various issues. 8 00:00:53,040 --> 00:00:57,629 So if you have any particular questions of really important clarification, you can interrupt the speakers. 9 00:00:57,630 --> 00:01:01,800 But in general, if we can wait until the end of the sessions to do that, 10 00:01:03,960 --> 00:01:09,600 the only thing then that leads me to do is to this, to invite us to and to come up so on. 11 00:01:09,600 --> 00:01:16,890 As a fellow at Corpus Christi where she lectures along with me, I'm in the psychology departments there and so on. 12 00:01:17,070 --> 00:01:28,740 And I've had many discussions about unconscious memory and and she's a has has taught in Cambridge and in Berlin and is about to move to California, 13 00:01:28,740 --> 00:01:32,430 where we're very sad to be losing her too, but very happy that she's going to be going there. 14 00:01:32,430 --> 00:01:36,840 So she's going to give us a talk on the memory in the new consciousness. 15 00:01:41,590 --> 00:01:44,950 I thank you for coming. It's really great to see you here. 16 00:01:46,720 --> 00:01:50,020 I'll try not to disturb the setup. Yeah. No, no, no, no. 17 00:01:50,140 --> 00:01:57,090 At this one. So I've always been interested in where ideas come from, especially when reading books. 18 00:01:57,180 --> 00:02:00,370 But where did you forget this idea? Why this book and not that book? 19 00:02:00,610 --> 00:02:09,489 Why this poem and not some other? And when you ask novelists and poets about how they came to write a particular piece, 20 00:02:09,490 --> 00:02:15,550 which I tried to do as much as I can, often as I can, they'll often say they'll only say, Well, they don't really know. 21 00:02:16,360 --> 00:02:22,059 They'll say that. Well, and he's going to reverse this tradition today by telling us exactly how she comes to write a piece. 22 00:02:22,060 --> 00:02:28,780 But often the writers and artists will say that the beginning of a piece is nothing like as concrete as an idea, 23 00:02:29,050 --> 00:02:31,630 but something more on the level of a dilemma. 24 00:02:32,590 --> 00:02:39,280 The writer has to push ahead into the dark, holding the glimmer like a candle and just fill out the options. 25 00:02:40,840 --> 00:02:51,190 At this delicate point in the creative process, do not try to think consciously advised Kipling based on his experience of writing The Jungle Book. 26 00:02:51,970 --> 00:02:56,410 He counselled Drift. Wait. Obey. 27 00:02:57,760 --> 00:03:04,360 Harold Pinter described this phase in more radical terms, as he stated in his Nobel lecture in 2005. 28 00:03:05,170 --> 00:03:14,050 I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say, nor can I have a sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. 29 00:03:14,380 --> 00:03:21,250 That is what they said. Most of the plays are intended by a line, a word, or an image. 30 00:03:22,500 --> 00:03:28,860 The Given award, which comes right out of the blue into my head, is often shortly followed by the image. 31 00:03:30,570 --> 00:03:34,590 The first line of the homecoming is. What have you done with the scissors? 32 00:03:35,520 --> 00:03:41,070 The first line of all times is dark. In each case, I had no further information. 33 00:03:41,370 --> 00:03:46,260 In each case, I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. 34 00:03:47,320 --> 00:03:53,110 This happened visually, a very slow fade through shadow into light. 35 00:03:55,650 --> 00:04:02,430 Something appearing right out of the blue is one of the most abiding images we have of the creative process. 36 00:04:02,820 --> 00:04:07,890 It points to a connection between creativity and what we might call the unconscious. 37 00:04:08,700 --> 00:04:14,190 But since the unconscious is by definition that which is not available to our conscious awareness, 38 00:04:14,520 --> 00:04:20,280 elaborating the range of its phenomena with any conceptual precision is often elusive. 39 00:04:21,490 --> 00:04:35,020 So it's often vaguely expressed as a premonition or intuition, a hunch, a sense of things more commonly, especially in the premodern period. 40 00:04:35,470 --> 00:04:41,980 It was metaphor ized as muse, demon or supernatural inspiration. 41 00:04:43,750 --> 00:04:49,450 The range of metaphors hardened into a philosophical and scientific concept in the 19th century. 42 00:04:50,170 --> 00:04:55,060 Of course, prominent ideas about the unconscious can be traced all the way back to hypocrisies, 43 00:04:55,360 --> 00:05:00,640 and the world of unconscious came into use at the same time as consciousness in the 17th century. 44 00:05:00,970 --> 00:05:05,200 But it's around the middle of the 19th century that we begin to see substantial numbers, 45 00:05:05,470 --> 00:05:10,270 a number of references to it in medical and philosophical publications, 46 00:05:10,270 --> 00:05:16,180 and to witness the emergence of unconscious as a scientific object of investigation. 47 00:05:17,500 --> 00:05:24,280 Between the 1870s and the 1930s, or what we might call the first age of modern research into the unconscious, 48 00:05:24,610 --> 00:05:28,780 there was a proliferation of various models of unconscious processes. 49 00:05:29,560 --> 00:05:37,840 The most notable developments came out of an were situated within the German philosophical tradition and French dynamic psychiatry. 50 00:05:39,040 --> 00:05:43,149 But whether we're looking at the elaborations of the unconscious or the subconscious 51 00:05:43,150 --> 00:05:47,980 in the ideas of Frantz Mesmer or the automatic writing thesis of Pierre Shani, 52 00:05:48,450 --> 00:05:51,880 whether we're tracing it back with reference to Kant guts and Schopenhauer, 53 00:05:52,390 --> 00:05:58,630 the unconscious in this first phase tends to culminate in the psychoanalytic models of Freud. 54 00:06:01,030 --> 00:06:07,210 So on the on the right is the is the model that Foyt himself drew. 55 00:06:08,350 --> 00:06:15,190 And running through these various models are threats of shared assumptions, three of which I will pick out. 56 00:06:16,930 --> 00:06:27,310 The first is that the unconscious during this period was defined in relation to various ideas of consciousness and was configured as part of a binary. 57 00:06:29,020 --> 00:06:37,419 The second is that unconscious processes were generally given primary agency over the conscious mind that the unconscious knew more, 58 00:06:37,420 --> 00:06:43,749 it knew better, and so on. And third is the dynamic between the unconscious. 59 00:06:43,750 --> 00:06:52,630 Unconscious was generally conceived in terms of either electromagnetism or more often pressure, especially hydraulic pressure. 60 00:06:53,170 --> 00:06:59,230 So repression, suppression and control were foundational concepts. 61 00:07:01,640 --> 00:07:07,520 These are the common threads that we have inherited and they're deeply interwoven into how we view ourselves. 62 00:07:07,910 --> 00:07:17,780 Literature and culture today. So influential is the psychoanalytic legacy that it is routinely accepted that the modern subject is divided, 63 00:07:18,440 --> 00:07:21,590 that the unconscious is a repository of deeper truths, 64 00:07:22,040 --> 00:07:27,710 and it is at the level of the unconscious that we can really make sense of ourselves and our society. 65 00:07:28,010 --> 00:07:33,560 And these basic principles have yielded powerful interpretive models, such as the collective unconscious, 66 00:07:34,070 --> 00:07:41,030 the linguistic unconscious, the political unconscious, the postcolonial unconscious and so on and so forth. 67 00:07:42,530 --> 00:07:50,600 Nevertheless, there have been questions raised about the ontological instability of the concept going back to the 1930s, 68 00:07:51,590 --> 00:07:55,549 the ascendency of positivist models of knowledge in the 1930s. 69 00:07:55,550 --> 00:08:01,910 That verifiability and experimental replicability is the standard of scientific inquiry, 70 00:08:01,910 --> 00:08:08,989 leaving no room for mental anomalous phenomena such as feeling and the unconscious in psychology, 71 00:08:08,990 --> 00:08:12,799 psycho physics and behaviourism took centre stage, 72 00:08:12,800 --> 00:08:19,490 focusing exclusively on what was objects objectively testable and dismissing ideas 73 00:08:20,270 --> 00:08:24,830 about the unconscious because they could not be empirically verified or measured. 74 00:08:26,570 --> 00:08:28,820 This was a general intellectual trend. 75 00:08:29,060 --> 00:08:37,310 By the middle of the last century, even the traditionally non-scientific disciplines aspired to positivist models of knowledge. 76 00:08:38,030 --> 00:08:46,090 So, for example, in philosophy, the rise of logical positivism rendered what is not testable and falsifiable as meaningless. 77 00:08:46,100 --> 00:08:50,900 This is a technical term that is meaningless in literary studies. 78 00:08:51,290 --> 00:08:58,370 There was the rise of new criticism which scrupulously excluded non verifiable questions from interpretation. 79 00:08:59,390 --> 00:09:06,140 In this general climate, Karl Popper famously dismissed psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. 80 00:09:07,710 --> 00:09:13,140 Much has changed in the last 50 years, but the scepticism still remains today. 81 00:09:13,170 --> 00:09:17,010 For example, Angus Nichols, who was one of our speakers in the series, 82 00:09:17,310 --> 00:09:27,240 gave an excellent presentation on whether the unconscious actually exists objectively, independently of its theoretical elaborations. 83 00:09:27,990 --> 00:09:32,340 For Nichols, the unconscious is more a metaphor than a scientific concept, 84 00:09:32,490 --> 00:09:38,730 and if one speaks of it at the level of concepts, then it is a concept that creates its own object. 85 00:09:39,030 --> 00:09:44,670 That is to say that the background framework surrounding the unconscious pre-existed 86 00:09:45,030 --> 00:09:49,799 the specifics and is only during the act of narration writing about it, 87 00:09:49,800 --> 00:09:53,910 talking about it that the unconscious emerges into an entity. 88 00:09:55,530 --> 00:10:03,330 In this view, the unconscious is a classic case of an effect produced by the discourse which purports to investigate it. 89 00:10:05,670 --> 00:10:13,060 Meanwhile, in the last 40 years, a different line of thinking about the unconscious has emerged from altogether elsewhere. 90 00:10:13,800 --> 00:10:20,160 In the new field of cognitive neuroscience. Developing what we might call the cognitive unconscious. 91 00:10:21,390 --> 00:10:25,110 Crucial to the advances of the cognitive unconscious. 92 00:10:25,440 --> 00:10:33,450 Was the discovery in the 1980s in neuroscience of unconscious perception and unconscious memory, 93 00:10:34,020 --> 00:10:41,250 which established empirically that very little of what goes on in the brain is available to awareness. 94 00:10:42,860 --> 00:10:47,569 The cognitive oncologist offers a rather different model from the psychoanalytic unconscious. 95 00:10:47,570 --> 00:10:54,740 But in spite of the differences, the cognitive angle has successfully reinstated the unconscious as a legitimate scientific topic, 96 00:10:55,070 --> 00:11:00,020 including the psychoanalytic unconscious developed around the turn of the last century. 97 00:11:01,100 --> 00:11:04,970 And we can see this in the new field of neuro psychoanalysis. 98 00:11:05,660 --> 00:11:08,720 Mark Soames, who pioneered this field, was also one of our speakers. 99 00:11:10,190 --> 00:11:13,070 But there are differences. And again, I'll pick out three. 100 00:11:14,360 --> 00:11:24,590 First, the cognitive unconscious is not defined in relation to consciousness, but investigated as part of a variety of mental processes. 101 00:11:24,890 --> 00:11:28,880 The structure of mind is thus not binary but modular. 102 00:11:30,420 --> 00:11:40,440 Second, unconscious processes are not given agency over the conscious mind, but are seen as working together and in parallel and in combination. 103 00:11:41,750 --> 00:11:53,690 And third, the dynamic between the unconscious and consciousness is not one which is hydraulic or magnetic, but a relation of connected networks. 104 00:11:54,620 --> 00:11:55,549 So to elaborate, 105 00:11:55,550 --> 00:12:05,900 the modular view of brain and mind proposes that there are specific regions and specific neural circuits for carrying out particular functions, 106 00:12:06,200 --> 00:12:11,900 and that they all work independently of one another as well as in parallel and in combination. 107 00:12:12,980 --> 00:12:18,320 So for a basic example, we, we often hear about the four lobes of the brain, 108 00:12:19,220 --> 00:12:25,340 which gives rise to mind as having certain features we associate with them the frontal lobe. 109 00:12:25,350 --> 00:12:29,150 So thinking and planning and moving the occipital lobe, 110 00:12:29,450 --> 00:12:35,570 seeing the temporal lobe with remembering an emotion and the private lobe with spatial function. 111 00:12:37,280 --> 00:12:45,620 A more concrete example of the modularity of the human brain is illustrated by our Five Senses vision. 112 00:12:47,260 --> 00:12:53,270 Hearing. Taste. Touch and smell. 113 00:12:54,570 --> 00:12:58,680 These are any controls sculpture sense, which you just saw. 114 00:12:58,920 --> 00:13:06,600 Annie, who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London, has done a series of sculptures which show ephemeral scans of the brain converted into 115 00:13:06,600 --> 00:13:11,520 three dimensional structures of amber resin as the subject experiences each of the senses. 116 00:13:11,850 --> 00:13:15,150 And these are on permanent display in the Wellcome Collection in London. 117 00:13:17,150 --> 00:13:22,670 To now to probe deeper into how the unconscious features in this modular view of the brain. 118 00:13:23,690 --> 00:13:31,520 I would now like to discuss two landmark discoveries in cognitive neuroscience that are relevant to the cognitive unconscious. 119 00:13:32,480 --> 00:13:37,510 First is Michigan and Leslie Unger latest work on visual pathways. 120 00:13:37,520 --> 00:13:41,330 And second, the taxonomy of memory charted by Larry Squire. 121 00:13:42,290 --> 00:13:48,560 Before I begin, I should say that I won't have time to discuss the experiments themselves, but only to draw upon the conclusions. 122 00:13:48,920 --> 00:13:54,170 The details of the many experiments that led to the model of the brain that I'm about to outline can be found in this book. 123 00:13:54,560 --> 00:14:04,940 Oh, sorry. That's another shot of any controls. I have a sense, and this is a book of memory from mind to molecule by Larry Squire and Eric Kandel. 124 00:14:06,260 --> 00:14:11,030 So first, unconscious perception. What is it to perceive unconsciously? 125 00:14:12,490 --> 00:14:18,250 This is a figure showing Leslie England's discovery of the what's and the where pathways. 126 00:14:18,700 --> 00:14:26,620 So even a very simple perceptual process like identifying an object visually, like a pointer or a single word on the page, 127 00:14:26,950 --> 00:14:36,100 involves information about the outer world travelling from the retina to the thalamus, which which is about four or five senses fast go. 128 00:14:36,370 --> 00:14:42,040 And we had a talk on this topic by Gordon Sheppard on Proustian memory, which is wonderful. 129 00:14:42,440 --> 00:14:49,520 Anyways, it goes to this the thalamus arriving fast in the visual cortex V1 and the v2 and v three. 130 00:14:49,750 --> 00:14:56,260 And the neuroscientist who pioneered the identification of areas v1 v2 v three. 131 00:14:56,260 --> 00:15:02,530 We also had as a speaker say music he who spoke about significant form, which is a brilliant, brilliant seminar. 132 00:15:02,800 --> 00:15:18,120 So it goes to V1. And what Myshkin and Ungerleider discovered is then the information travels through two pathways, two main pathways. 133 00:15:18,270 --> 00:15:22,920 So you can see the green pathway and the red pathway through the top dorsal stream here. 134 00:15:24,160 --> 00:15:33,370 Devoted to spatial processing, the web pathway, passing information about where the object is culminating in the parietal cortex. 135 00:15:33,640 --> 00:15:42,970 Sorry. Yep. Here. That in the parietal cortex by neurones that respond to movement and location. 136 00:15:43,150 --> 00:15:50,050 Neurones that are specific to movement or location. It also travels through the bottom stream. 137 00:15:50,230 --> 00:15:56,740 The temple. What pathway? Which are areas that specialise in object processing? 138 00:15:56,860 --> 00:16:08,050 What? The object is culminating in the temporal lobe area by neurones that respond to information about size, colour and orientation. 139 00:16:09,280 --> 00:16:13,090 Up to there are about two 100 million neurones representing each box. 140 00:16:13,450 --> 00:16:17,410 Between about 10 million and 100 million. So information about the object. 141 00:16:17,740 --> 00:16:22,420 So where and the what moves in series and in parallel. 142 00:16:22,600 --> 00:16:26,470 As you can see, fitting for to the temporal lobe. 143 00:16:28,060 --> 00:16:31,740 Sorry. To the frontal lobe. To link to action. To the amygdala. 144 00:16:31,750 --> 00:16:38,410 Here for information, emotional processing and to the medial temporal lobe for memory and so on. 145 00:16:39,010 --> 00:16:44,110 All of this is achieved according to Ungerleider, in less than 50 milliseconds. 146 00:16:45,040 --> 00:16:49,419 Arrestingly they and others discover that information that travels through the 147 00:16:49,420 --> 00:16:55,300 web pathway that the to the top dorsal stream is for the significant part, 148 00:16:55,390 --> 00:17:04,750 inaccessible to consciousness. It's primarily unconscious while information in the what pathway, what the object is, is chiefly conscious. 149 00:17:05,590 --> 00:17:12,520 So even a cognitive task as apparently simple as visual identification, which takes milliseconds, 150 00:17:12,940 --> 00:17:18,930 entails the integration of conscious and unconscious processes to complete it. 151 00:17:20,540 --> 00:17:29,780 Every conscious experience we have is actually the result of a background of unconscious processes or puts in another way. 152 00:17:30,320 --> 00:17:35,660 Unconscious processes pervade our conscious experience on every level. 153 00:17:37,310 --> 00:17:44,240 In addition to being separate and modular, we can see that the perceptual pathways presented in like this figure are connected. 154 00:17:45,110 --> 00:17:48,229 Which takes me to the second difference between the two models. 155 00:17:48,230 --> 00:17:56,420 The model of mine proposed here is a connected system of networks, not a hydraulic system founded on pressure. 156 00:17:57,610 --> 00:18:01,060 The pathways in this figure, as you can see, are reciprocal. 157 00:18:01,210 --> 00:18:04,570 Information travels backwards as well as forwards. 158 00:18:04,870 --> 00:18:10,420 That is to say, perception isn't just a passive detection of stimuli in the brain. 159 00:18:11,420 --> 00:18:19,790 For the information to be experienced as perception, the brain organises the fragmented stimuli into a coherent whole. 160 00:18:20,540 --> 00:18:28,069 Different neural structures connect with each other, reconstructing the incoming data in the light of memories acquired through prior 161 00:18:28,070 --> 00:18:33,800 experiences to enable us to gauge the meaning and the value of the information. 162 00:18:34,880 --> 00:18:39,290 So the eyes are not just telling the brain information about what and the where of the object, 163 00:18:39,950 --> 00:18:47,330 but the brain is also telling the eyes, as it were, what it is you are looking at and how you should feel about it. 164 00:18:48,520 --> 00:18:57,340 So to summarise, the information pathway are not only modular but connected and building on perception to memory. 165 00:18:57,350 --> 00:19:07,690 If we think about memory as an extension of perception and experience, we find that neuroscience also figures memory as modular and connected. 166 00:19:08,620 --> 00:19:16,330 This is Larry Squire map of the long term memory system published in 1986, where he classifies the different kinds of memory. 167 00:19:16,690 --> 00:19:21,489 Larry gave the first opening seminar with Simon Kemp, who is here today, 168 00:19:21,490 --> 00:19:25,629 which is a wonderful occasion, and he's already talked a great deal about all this. 169 00:19:25,630 --> 00:19:28,510 But I'll just go through the main points. So, Larry, 170 00:19:28,510 --> 00:19:38,800 classified long term memory in two different systems that are separate and independent with distinct neuro anatomical structures that support them. 171 00:19:39,190 --> 00:19:47,770 For example, neurones specific to the declarative memory system in the hippocampus are these hippocampal pyramidal neurones. 172 00:19:48,490 --> 00:19:53,260 These are our friends that help us to remember things. So going back to the chart. 173 00:19:53,530 --> 00:20:02,450 So what is what is declarative memory here? So these are this is memory that we mean when we normally talk about memory. 174 00:20:02,650 --> 00:20:07,450 These are the facts and events that we can consciously remember. 175 00:20:07,570 --> 00:20:15,730 So autobiographical memory, cultural memory, historical memory are all declarative because we can remember what it is that we remember. 176 00:20:17,080 --> 00:20:20,530 And they they are stored in the hippocampus in this area. 177 00:20:21,700 --> 00:20:30,280 It's explicit memory, but there are other kinds of memory, memory that we can't remember or we don't know that we have. 178 00:20:31,230 --> 00:20:37,320 Memory, Esquire writes, is not a single entity, but it is composed of different systems. 179 00:20:37,710 --> 00:20:43,110 Only one of these systems, the declarative, explicit system, is accessible to awareness. 180 00:20:43,440 --> 00:20:52,590 The declarative memory system, what the conscious mind cannot access goes under the umbrella of non declarative memory or implicit memory, 181 00:20:53,760 --> 00:20:56,700 which is a large family of different kinds of memory. 182 00:20:57,240 --> 00:21:06,300 So we have skills and habits, priming, conditioning and non associative learning skills and habits which are stratum related. 183 00:21:06,510 --> 00:21:15,089 These are when we remember how to do certain things without thinking like for example, various motor skills like riding a bicycle, 184 00:21:15,090 --> 00:21:21,390 swimming, typing, texting, what we normally call muscle memory and perceptual skills as well. 185 00:21:21,570 --> 00:21:29,490 Like looking in the mirror and knowing automatically that the left and the right are reversed or recognising numbers, letters, musical notes. 186 00:21:30,180 --> 00:21:35,759 They're also everyday habits which are striatum related, like putting on the left shoe before the right shoe perhaps, 187 00:21:35,760 --> 00:21:40,050 or buttoning up the shirt from bottom to top as opposed to top to bottom. 188 00:21:40,320 --> 00:21:46,770 There's a great deal of very interesting research on treating dysfunctional dysfunction in the circuitry of the striatum for OCD, 189 00:21:46,980 --> 00:21:54,480 which is habit related priming here is distributed over the neocortex, 190 00:21:54,480 --> 00:22:03,690 and this is the ability to identify things that we have seen before faster when we have, then when we see them for the first time, 191 00:22:03,690 --> 00:22:09,929 even when we don't realise that we have seen them and there's a lot of research on this that the area that 192 00:22:09,930 --> 00:22:17,340 I'm particularly interested in is priming and prejudice in social neuroscience by people like John Barr, 193 00:22:18,480 --> 00:22:24,990 classic conditioning, you know, from Pavlov, but now also includes emotional learning, 194 00:22:25,320 --> 00:22:32,760 which is amygdala related, like fear phobia, all kinds of preferences, including love and attachment. 195 00:22:33,810 --> 00:22:38,520 There's also skeletal muscular conditioning, for example, eye blink conditioning and so on. 196 00:22:38,520 --> 00:22:40,710 And there's non associative learning here. 197 00:22:41,580 --> 00:22:49,739 The reflex pathways like habituation, for example, not really noticing the backdrop of our everyday experience, 198 00:22:49,740 --> 00:22:59,010 like when not really noticing when members of our family they have a has a haircut because we are habituated to them or conversely 199 00:22:59,010 --> 00:23:06,930 sensitisation by being hyper aware of something that has hurt you in the past out of the context in which it has occurred. 200 00:23:07,200 --> 00:23:08,880 I think we are all very familiar with this. 201 00:23:09,660 --> 00:23:19,640 All of this will be expressed as a way of seeing and being in the world, not as a memory, but as an instinct, as intuition, as personality. 202 00:23:20,790 --> 00:23:28,380 So what is significant about non declarative memory in the context of this discussion is that it doesn't seem like memory at all, 203 00:23:28,620 --> 00:23:31,530 but looks a lot more like what we would call the unconscious. 204 00:23:32,940 --> 00:23:37,829 But in contrast to the psychoanalytic model, the cognitive unconscious, as understood at present, 205 00:23:37,830 --> 00:23:47,910 does not have the powers to twist and foil our conscious plans, nor does it necessarily protect staff, protect our need of which we remain on aware. 206 00:23:48,810 --> 00:23:55,440 It is more the whole aggregate of experience recollected in non declarative form, 207 00:23:56,160 --> 00:24:03,629 less an entity that will return to haunt us with its semiotic and the bitterness powers than a shape which, 208 00:24:03,630 --> 00:24:10,350 like a riverbed formed by the accumulation of flow patterns, mould and guides our behaviour, 209 00:24:11,520 --> 00:24:18,870 habits of thinking and feeling, selective perception and behavioural inclination, patterns of reacting. 210 00:24:19,350 --> 00:24:24,809 The blindness and the sensitivity of our personality can be recast in terms of 211 00:24:24,810 --> 00:24:29,280 different forms of non declarative memory that we have accumulated over our lifetime. 212 00:24:31,060 --> 00:24:39,280 All over. All of the memory a baby acquires is unconscious memory, which, as a grown person, she will experience as a disposition. 213 00:24:40,060 --> 00:24:46,780 If a two year old boy is knocked down by a large dog as a grown man, he will have no recollection of this incident. 214 00:24:47,170 --> 00:24:52,900 But he may have a fear of dogs, which he will understand as a personality trait, not as a memory. 215 00:24:53,860 --> 00:25:02,349 Pinter's very slow fade through Shadow into Light can be discussed as non declarative memory shaping into consciousness, 216 00:25:02,350 --> 00:25:05,379 just as the array of metaphors of the unconscious, 217 00:25:05,380 --> 00:25:13,030 such as muse or demon, can be explored through the categories of different kinds of declarative and non declarative memory. 218 00:25:13,840 --> 00:25:24,130 Even belief structures and value systems are now reconfigured as various blends of conscious, unconsciously acquired memory. 219 00:25:25,060 --> 00:25:27,400 As Squire and Kandel point out. 220 00:25:29,330 --> 00:25:38,630 People do not generally remember consciously the circumstances in which they acquire and assimilate the moral principles that govern their lives. 221 00:25:40,120 --> 00:25:48,310 Many of our dispositions and styles that make up our personality are acquired similarly as non declarative knowledge. 222 00:25:49,780 --> 00:25:58,810 These principles and dispositions are acquired gradually, almost automatically, like the rules of grammar that govern on native language. 223 00:26:00,370 --> 00:26:07,540 So if I were to point to the chief difference between the cognitive unconscious and the psychoanalytic unconscious, it would be the role of memory. 224 00:26:09,650 --> 00:26:16,910 So this is the psychoanalytic version of memory where you have memory. 225 00:26:17,690 --> 00:26:26,390 But in the, in the pre conscious, which is a little segment and you've got the whole of the unconscious stored within sorry below. 226 00:26:28,010 --> 00:26:36,140 By current neuroscientific accounts, we fail to remember not because we have repressed our traumatic memories as in the Freudian model, 227 00:26:36,350 --> 00:26:44,300 but because of factors like non rehearsal, synaptic weakening, destruction, suggestibility blocking and so on and so forth. 228 00:26:44,570 --> 00:26:49,100 Dan chapters outlined this in his book, Great, great books, The Seven Sins of Memory. 229 00:26:50,720 --> 00:27:01,310 So within this model memory, from far from playing a small role, as in the Freudian model in the cognitive landscape, memory is the new unconscious. 230 00:27:02,720 --> 00:27:09,920 Squire and Kandel write these various forms of non declarative memory are ancient in evolutionary terms. 231 00:27:09,920 --> 00:27:18,020 They are reliable and consistent, and they provide for myriad unconscious ways of responding to the world in no 232 00:27:18,020 --> 00:27:23,080 small part by by virtue of the unconscious state of these forms of memory, 233 00:27:23,090 --> 00:27:26,870 they create much of the mystery of the human experience. 234 00:27:27,800 --> 00:27:38,210 Here arise the dispositions, habits and preferences that are inaccessible to conscious recollection but nevertheless are shaped by past events, 235 00:27:38,330 --> 00:27:43,250 influence our behaviour and mental life and are an important part of who we are. 236 00:27:44,450 --> 00:27:53,450 So I'd like to conclude by comparing the two models of the unconscious at the level of language and figuration instead of its ego and superego. 237 00:27:53,480 --> 00:27:57,440 We could discuss neural circuitry, systems and pathways. 238 00:27:58,100 --> 00:28:02,240 Repression might be prefigured in terms of dysfunctional connectivity. 239 00:28:02,720 --> 00:28:08,390 Libido and Jewish salts have been related related in terms of dopamine and oxytocin levels. 240 00:28:09,110 --> 00:28:12,140 Reward circuitry takes the place of the pleasure principle, 241 00:28:12,920 --> 00:28:21,230 which is to make my point of the conceptual frames that established the two models clearly reflect their historical period. 242 00:28:22,730 --> 00:28:30,380 Freud's topographic model owes much to 19th century hydraulic engineering, which was regarded as the latest technological invention, 243 00:28:30,710 --> 00:28:34,550 as well as geosciences, which was one of the dominant disciplines of the day. 244 00:28:37,390 --> 00:28:43,120 It also reflects the repressive and hierarchical structure of that of 19th century European middle class, 245 00:28:43,390 --> 00:28:47,710 patriarchal family and the ideologies arising from it. 246 00:28:49,060 --> 00:28:54,100 The cognitive unconscious of the 21st century is no different in this regard, 247 00:28:54,460 --> 00:29:03,370 embodying the historical moment from which it emerges that the brain should be cast in terms of hubs, networks and information pathways. 248 00:29:03,550 --> 00:29:12,250 It's not surprising. After the digital revolution, the network is the predominant organising metaphor of our time. 249 00:29:13,240 --> 00:29:20,590 From the neural network to the social network, connectivity captures the basic condition of the 21st century. 250 00:29:21,250 --> 00:29:32,560 In the post patriarchal ante, hierarchical identity performing localised liberal democracies of today separates independent modules. 251 00:29:32,800 --> 00:29:41,680 Connecting through connected connected networks is a paradigm that is applicable to a far wider sphere than just the brain. 252 00:29:42,760 --> 00:29:49,900 That is not to suggest that the cognitive unconscious is less legitimate for resonating in the culture of the 21st century. 253 00:29:50,830 --> 00:29:57,909 But the language in which the model is rendered does point to the fact that science emerges from specific 254 00:29:57,910 --> 00:30:04,990 historical and cultural conditions and will reflect those conditions even as it works to improve on them. 255 00:30:06,550 --> 00:30:14,170 As John Starr has pointed out, the model of the model of the mind has throughout history been figured in terms of the latest 256 00:30:14,170 --> 00:30:20,049 technology from the ancient Greeks who thought of the brain as a catapult to likeness, 257 00:30:20,050 --> 00:30:28,060 who thought of it as a mill. To the Victorians who likened it to the telegraph, to Freud's hydraulic and electromagnetic models, 258 00:30:28,360 --> 00:30:31,420 to Daniel Dennett, early model of the mind as a television. 259 00:30:31,960 --> 00:30:37,270 Our model of how the mind works is inescapably geared to our times. 260 00:30:38,620 --> 00:30:44,349 The cognitive unconscious provides biological evidence that the very slow fade through shadow 261 00:30:44,350 --> 00:30:50,500 into light actually exists at the neuronal level and is not just a metaphorical construction, 262 00:30:51,730 --> 00:30:59,680 but how these processes are going to be conceptualised will be established by the figurative frames that make meaning possible. 263 00:31:00,280 --> 00:31:08,109 The frames change the way we see the processes, so the unconscious fluctuates between concept and metaphor, 264 00:31:08,110 --> 00:31:15,670 between the different levels of meaning, from being a product of the discourse as well as the kernel of being that gave life to it. 265 00:31:16,450 --> 00:31:22,750 Thank you. Okay. 266 00:31:22,760 --> 00:31:26,780 Well well, thank you very much again for coming. 267 00:31:26,790 --> 00:31:31,940 And now we have the second speaker of the day who said, and I quote, The writer, 268 00:31:32,150 --> 00:31:41,620 painter and author did put her and her history in an English literature at work universe. 269 00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:47,210 That's right. And and written a number of important, interesting volumes of poetry. 270 00:31:48,260 --> 00:31:52,130 The one that I like the name of is the. The best man that ever was. 271 00:31:52,780 --> 00:31:56,689 And that. And now the remains. 272 00:31:56,690 --> 00:32:01,790 But. And others. So I'm looking forward to hearing. 273 00:32:02,570 --> 00:32:07,850 All right. Hello. It is really nice to see you. And I'm so grateful to someone for inviting me. 274 00:32:07,850 --> 00:32:10,490 It's a huge honour and lovely to be in Oxford. 275 00:32:12,200 --> 00:32:22,700 So with that work, it was a long time ago at a time of personal conflict when I couldn't make my life as I wanted it. 276 00:32:23,180 --> 00:32:28,340 I began psychotherapy. I sat in the chair and began to sing. 277 00:32:29,030 --> 00:32:34,940 Wouldn't it be loverly from My Fair Lady? And the therapist noticed my distress. 278 00:32:35,420 --> 00:32:43,700 He was on Continuum. And he said to me, You are Eliza Doolittle and I am Professor Higgins. 279 00:32:44,450 --> 00:32:52,400 Eliza is a wallflower girl who wants to be a well-spoken young lady in a flower shop. 280 00:32:53,150 --> 00:32:57,770 And she wants Professor Higgins to teach her to speak properly. 281 00:32:58,400 --> 00:33:05,510 And what she doesn't realise is that to fulfil a desire, she will also have to have a new self. 282 00:33:06,260 --> 00:33:12,950 You are a dissatisfied administrator and you want to be an artist. 283 00:33:13,310 --> 00:33:17,810 And to do that, you will also have to have a new self. 284 00:33:18,230 --> 00:33:21,470 And that is what we are going to do together in this room. 285 00:33:24,350 --> 00:33:29,420 Here is a poem that illustrates the kind of quandary I was at the time. 286 00:33:30,410 --> 00:33:36,740 It is called Avoids Officer, achieves the true pose and a voice officer is somebody. 287 00:33:37,430 --> 00:33:46,550 It's a local government kind of role where the job is to put people in flat that are hard to let. 288 00:33:47,270 --> 00:33:55,819 And the key pose is, I'm sure many of you practice yoga here is the very difficult asana in which the 289 00:33:55,820 --> 00:34:02,990 heel is wedged comfortably but firmly in the groyne and the arms are raised. 290 00:34:02,990 --> 00:34:10,370 It's very pressed on the arms, raised above the head. And when you do that, you really do feel you got somewhere, avoids the officer, 291 00:34:10,370 --> 00:34:21,200 achieves the true pose at times it seems that really that what she really ought to be doing with her life is for the aether to decide. 292 00:34:21,830 --> 00:34:30,470 She'll make a film about an early time before thought or cloth or pity or desire, when all was flappy, 293 00:34:30,650 --> 00:34:39,620 all obscure, half baked until a moment with a sink, a silkworm santa clause into the fibres of a mulberry leaf. 294 00:34:40,580 --> 00:34:43,910 As a delaying tactic, she finds another Frenchman. 295 00:34:44,420 --> 00:34:52,160 They meet in a bar so crowded that after shouting for half an hour at one another, they take a taxi to his place. 296 00:34:52,820 --> 00:34:59,600 She has had to repress her dismay at his jacket, and when it launched, it's off and she touches him. 297 00:35:00,140 --> 00:35:03,290 She recalls the final parting with her therapist. 298 00:35:03,680 --> 00:35:10,550 Someone who'd wear that shade of lipstick must lack the judgement to unmask her roots. 299 00:35:11,270 --> 00:35:18,169 This is a life lived in a lunchbreak when your desires have been pushed away and the 300 00:35:18,170 --> 00:35:24,380 corporations discourse is about as interesting to you as the microbiology of the plant, 301 00:35:25,010 --> 00:35:31,040 that's when some new word or thoughts suggests a whole new set of possibilities. 302 00:35:31,400 --> 00:35:38,120 And standing on one leg in prayer, she knows her real deficiencies have yet to flower. 303 00:35:40,880 --> 00:35:48,830 When I'm working on a poem, although I always have an intention, it's rare that I feel I'm its author. 304 00:35:49,460 --> 00:35:55,070 If a word or phrase comes to me, I do not feel that I have chosen it. 305 00:35:55,520 --> 00:35:59,780 It's more like a card that has been dealt to me in a game. 306 00:36:00,620 --> 00:36:07,250 Like many poets, I tend to distrust anything that feels too deliberate in the act of writing. 307 00:36:07,640 --> 00:36:14,750 I often experience words as insubstantial, stale, alien and somehow flabby. 308 00:36:15,410 --> 00:36:20,990 It's only when a word or phrase carries an inexplicable sense of conviction. 309 00:36:21,560 --> 00:36:25,370 There's the sort of momentum becomes available to me. 310 00:36:25,760 --> 00:36:34,880 It's like that moment which you get into a very decrepit car and without hope, you turn the key in the ignition and it chokes into life. 311 00:36:35,510 --> 00:36:43,130 It's only much later, usually long after publication, that my poems begin to reveal their meaning for me. 312 00:36:43,580 --> 00:36:48,860 It's one of the great pleasures of writing. I shall read a poem that deals with this theme. 313 00:36:49,520 --> 00:36:55,790 It's really only writing this piece for you today that I realised what this poem is about. 314 00:36:56,360 --> 00:37:07,520 I wrote the word manipulation on a sheet of paper, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I felt as if I was intruding on someone who wanted to be left alone. 315 00:37:10,730 --> 00:37:23,000 The manipulation of words. I dropped one down and like a somebody that it turns and looks at me as if to say, okay, you've done fine. 316 00:37:23,600 --> 00:37:25,460 Go and amuse yourself somewhere. 317 00:37:26,240 --> 00:37:37,880 And here I am now, on this beach strewn with the limbs of old love, the crumpled newspaper of new love, his crossword, my striped windbreak. 318 00:37:38,390 --> 00:37:44,330 I wander down the line of surf pocketing debris that I've pocketed before the half 319 00:37:44,330 --> 00:37:50,110 sunk shows and fluttered over with the orange and blue twists of Chandler's cord, 320 00:37:50,780 --> 00:37:58,790 the lozenge of this brick wall, smooth disparities in my urge to signify and insist there's nothing to improve for. 321 00:37:58,790 --> 00:38:03,290 It's a brick as unlike any other as I was when I loved another. 322 00:38:03,680 --> 00:38:08,210 And everything he loved about me then, even though I knew he didn't care. 323 00:38:08,720 --> 00:38:15,050 With all my force, I love it. I have to see. And on the subject of words, 324 00:38:15,530 --> 00:38:25,340 I feel that one way of understanding the essence of any important relationship is to recall and reflect on the words a person is spoken to. 325 00:38:26,030 --> 00:38:36,410 In some ways, you could say that the words and the relationship, they may have been spoken for you to make something of, 326 00:38:36,800 --> 00:38:40,670 and therefore, even if they may have been difficult to receive. 327 00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:43,370 Precious and even transformative. 328 00:38:44,480 --> 00:38:52,460 I am blessed with a good memory for these things, and many of my poems emerge through the words that have been spoken to me. 329 00:38:52,540 --> 00:38:57,830 I hope I can find them again. 330 00:39:05,840 --> 00:39:16,010 As you happened to be. He was talking to me about the great composers fingering the air with his long fingered hand, 331 00:39:16,550 --> 00:39:25,220 how that music gets inside you and shapes you, how it takes command of your life, even to the extent of making you appear. 332 00:39:25,820 --> 00:39:34,010 Maybe not exactly as you would like to be seen, or even in spite of who you are, but rather as you happen to be. 333 00:39:34,670 --> 00:39:41,900 And when I asked him what he meant, he said, Supposing someone said they hated Beethoven and loved Scarlatti. 334 00:39:42,470 --> 00:39:49,040 What would you think? And I thought, how strange, eccentric and ornate that sounds. 335 00:39:49,460 --> 00:39:56,030 But apart from being the kind of question I'm going to pretend I haven't heard, it can't really mean anything, can it? 336 00:39:56,540 --> 00:40:04,100 And what would I admit to? And so I got into my car with my little shifty eyed judgements, 337 00:40:04,640 --> 00:40:16,070 wondering at what point along that spectrum I'd place myself always so fearful and competitive and terrified to be seen plumping for anything. 338 00:40:16,550 --> 00:40:20,540 And then after he died, when I told you what he said, 339 00:40:20,930 --> 00:40:29,120 you said that you always hated Beethoven and all romantic music, feelings and violins, and that you love Scarlatti. 340 00:40:29,600 --> 00:40:44,380 Simple, but of course it. His mother is. 341 00:40:50,680 --> 00:40:54,700 These are words spoken to me by my father probably some 15 years ago. 342 00:40:55,720 --> 00:41:00,880 Birth control. This really ought to be the most marvellous thing. 343 00:41:01,720 --> 00:41:03,040 But aren't words strange? 344 00:41:03,630 --> 00:41:11,890 But after all, what could be better than the beginning of a life and control necessary for everything that life has to offer? 345 00:41:12,340 --> 00:41:24,100 And incidentally, one of my favourite things. Okay, here's another one. 346 00:41:26,230 --> 00:41:34,800 This was spoken to me by a friend in Sri Lanka, a guide whose name was Lal with them around. 347 00:41:35,050 --> 00:41:43,840 And it was a very enjoyable experience and we are still in touch and we will go there again and again. 348 00:41:44,830 --> 00:41:53,650 The intermediate is no good. There were homemade devils tied to the roofs of all the village houses and it really November. 349 00:41:54,100 --> 00:41:56,860 I asked you if this was a hangover of Guy Fawkes. 350 00:41:57,220 --> 00:42:05,350 From the days of British rule, a kind of intimacy had been established between us, and that's the astonishing figure of the Buddha. 351 00:42:05,680 --> 00:42:10,360 In an Oregon of scallops rocket out the sky like a vast blancmange. 352 00:42:10,690 --> 00:42:16,060 You touched my knee with your forefinger and said, Eliminate the darkness, my friend. 353 00:42:16,810 --> 00:42:20,140 You pointed out the monkeys playing catch on the balconies, 354 00:42:20,530 --> 00:42:26,380 the red drum pupils perched on the fence posts, and the man, the scorpion on the flap of his bed. 355 00:42:26,650 --> 00:42:34,660 And I felt my phone give out in my pocket. We drove along the wide street where women famed for their yellow, 356 00:42:34,660 --> 00:42:41,500 pink and lilac dresses sold fruit to the passing trade, looking for an adaptor for my charger. 357 00:42:41,890 --> 00:42:50,020 And it came to me that at the end it came to me that adaptors can only go outwards from their countries of origin. 358 00:42:50,470 --> 00:42:55,840 And this was confirmed by the vendor in the shop where electrical goods were sold. 359 00:42:56,560 --> 00:43:01,960 We were feeling peckish and stuck at the stall and sold phosphorescent garden furniture 360 00:43:02,410 --> 00:43:07,270 and had a round of drinks and pale fried eggs with peas in the echoing canteen 361 00:43:07,630 --> 00:43:12,790 and watched the giant monitor lizards sifting the garbage while you were sight 362 00:43:12,790 --> 00:43:18,970 of Grey's allergy and advanced mouse model of intelligent luxury in the museum. 363 00:43:19,300 --> 00:43:28,870 A graceful young woman with impeccable diction and a mild but educative manner showed me the go glide mask of temporary madness. 364 00:43:29,860 --> 00:43:33,250 That's the one for me. I thought and felt better immediately. 365 00:43:34,540 --> 00:43:40,989 The source of great pleasure to me that I read time well go by Michael Ondaatje and he covers he 366 00:43:40,990 --> 00:43:48,660 thought you were saying things so obviously you need to take them then take them anyway onwards. 367 00:43:49,270 --> 00:43:54,400 Dreams have always played a large part in my imaginative life, 368 00:43:54,850 --> 00:44:00,760 and I have recurrent dreams that I've been having all my life, which I often use to write my poems. 369 00:44:01,990 --> 00:44:10,990 The most frequently. Recurrent one is that a lake or swamp appears in my living room or living space, and it takes over. 370 00:44:11,470 --> 00:44:15,400 The swamp has dense and shallows and is full of deformed, 371 00:44:15,400 --> 00:44:21,430 spectacularly horrific and gorgeous creatures that change their shape and colour before my eyes, 372 00:44:21,790 --> 00:44:30,370 delighting and threatening me by turn as they slither towards me, just will perform some dreadful act of consummation. 373 00:44:31,360 --> 00:44:34,510 I've often wondered about what this dream means. 374 00:44:34,990 --> 00:44:45,880 As a child, I was obsessed with finding live animals and was always looking for them lizards, insects, frogs, caterpillars, fish, crabs and snakes. 375 00:44:46,480 --> 00:44:56,740 Once my stepfather, who was concerned for my development and growing up, told me that this was an obsession I ought to outgrow. 376 00:44:57,190 --> 00:44:58,479 And I was thinking about this, 377 00:44:58,480 --> 00:45:08,020 and it occurred to me that what I might have been up to at that time was something which is called Participation Mystique, 378 00:45:08,650 --> 00:45:16,030 where the viewer and the object viewed somehow don't have boundaries. 379 00:45:16,360 --> 00:45:27,790 And for example, I suppose an example of this is where where the hunter dresses in the colours and maybe the textures, all of the hunted animal. 380 00:45:28,690 --> 00:45:39,940 And I think I was in some sense seeking a sense of sort of literature to the this legitimacy for myself and power. 381 00:45:41,500 --> 00:45:48,490 Once I found a beautiful orange and blue nudes in the huge woodpile behind my grandfather's house. 382 00:45:48,940 --> 00:45:53,229 And completely demolished it in the hope of finding more completely blocking the path. 383 00:45:53,230 --> 00:46:00,580 For days in my maternal grandfather's house, among his huge collection of ancient artefacts, 384 00:46:00,880 --> 00:46:05,440 there was more a piece that I used to pass every day on my way downstairs. 385 00:46:05,980 --> 00:46:10,180 Otherwise, I'd naked go riding on a rampant bear. 386 00:46:10,570 --> 00:46:15,430 And to my delight, I'm able to show that, you know, I thought that girl was me. 387 00:46:17,050 --> 00:46:23,680 I've always loved the paintings of Rousseau and perhaps the symbolic power spread into my dream life. 388 00:46:24,310 --> 00:46:28,150 As a child, I remember often feeling that I was an animal. 389 00:46:29,590 --> 00:46:32,590 I feel to poems that are related to this dream. 390 00:46:34,510 --> 00:46:39,339 The first of these is the yes and the no and the terrible. 391 00:46:39,340 --> 00:46:50,440 Thank you. This was written I was part of a project organised by a friend and fellow poet Simon Barraclough, 392 00:46:50,920 --> 00:46:57,070 who took the film Hitchcock's film Psycho and sliced it into 12 pieces. 393 00:46:57,410 --> 00:47:03,490 And I got the last bit where you see the people gathering outside the courthouse. 394 00:47:04,670 --> 00:47:11,170 It was a it was a very difficult experience. The yes and the no and the terrible. 395 00:47:11,170 --> 00:47:14,410 Thank you. I don't know what to say about you. 396 00:47:15,160 --> 00:47:21,190 There is nothing to say about you except that you are, in my mind, hideous complexity. 397 00:47:21,940 --> 00:47:30,970 It is only a film that I have watched too many times and I have often driven long distances worrying about money and the people I have wronged. 398 00:47:31,690 --> 00:47:39,340 Many films have swamps with dead bodies hidden in them, and I feel implicated when the car is winched to surface. 399 00:47:39,640 --> 00:47:45,070 Then everything will be proven. The wounds of the weapon, the approximate times of death. 400 00:47:45,370 --> 00:47:50,410 The missing girl, Paul Arbogast. We are almost at the end. 401 00:47:50,710 --> 00:47:55,340 I can go back to my own swamp and its wisecracking inhabitants. 402 00:47:55,630 --> 00:48:00,940 There are stitches coming loose. The psychiatrist theory is watertight. 403 00:48:01,390 --> 00:48:04,630 She was a cleaning, demanding woman. 404 00:48:04,930 --> 00:48:08,500 He was always bad. So yes and no. 405 00:48:08,800 --> 00:48:12,820 And a marion for whom no one cried. And the terrible. 406 00:48:12,820 --> 00:48:21,740 Thank you. And here is another one. 407 00:48:28,630 --> 00:48:31,840 Slightly more benign may be a backwater. 408 00:48:33,670 --> 00:48:41,860 Some find, even 40 million years ago when this place was just a backwater in an endless marshy zone. 409 00:48:42,700 --> 00:48:51,040 Batteries of cataclysmic forces gave rise to a major hiccup in the evolutionary paths of all its early residents. 410 00:48:51,760 --> 00:48:59,890 Those who'd once walked upright were now engulfed below, and those who tunnelled in the dark now out of the sky. 411 00:49:00,430 --> 00:49:04,959 But none of them could thrive for long because a fatal weakening in the 412 00:49:04,960 --> 00:49:10,270 accumulated layers of silt caused fragments of the land to break and float away, 413 00:49:10,720 --> 00:49:19,360 becoming then impaled and thereby anchored on a range of some aquatic mountain peaks whose subsequent volcanic blasts, 414 00:49:19,720 --> 00:49:25,570 while laced to what play waste to what had been before, gave birth to new, 415 00:49:25,810 --> 00:49:33,520 more varied types of land mass who still live mostly underwater and where eventually 416 00:49:33,850 --> 00:49:40,240 the left wing of the waterfowl species of staggering variety converged on every shore, 417 00:49:40,660 --> 00:49:47,890 along swamp, swamp and running for that were as yet no rivers as we understand them, 418 00:49:48,250 --> 00:49:57,190 and begun adapting to the elemental tasks of digging, hunting, feeding, nesting, [INAUDIBLE] and making calls every need. 419 00:49:57,460 --> 00:50:01,630 Mating. Rearing young. Warning of dangers far in the air. 420 00:50:01,900 --> 00:50:04,960 Laying traps, sticking to a favourite spot. 421 00:50:05,290 --> 00:50:13,720 Migrating in great numbers to a distant clime play host to parasites, boring holes forming colonies with queens and grooms. 422 00:50:13,990 --> 00:50:17,200 Overcoming obstacles using camouflage. 423 00:50:17,410 --> 00:50:21,190 Surviving without food. Complete competing for a mate. 424 00:50:21,490 --> 00:50:26,590 Committing suicide. Two creatures lay together in a time of mass. 425 00:50:26,980 --> 00:50:30,580 The male of a scrawny physique along the head. 426 00:50:30,580 --> 00:50:38,020 And she appeared quite fused to her, brought back in a protracted, almost unmoving copulation. 427 00:50:38,620 --> 00:50:47,110 The waving of her warty snout, adorned with an impressive array of spikes, showed the true appreciation of his neighbours. 428 00:50:47,860 --> 00:50:53,500 A sudden sound half bent, half sighing, broke the primaeval silence. 429 00:50:53,950 --> 00:51:00,550 The fellow loosed, his amorous hoad shook himself twice, and without a backward glance to which is lady love. 430 00:51:00,790 --> 00:51:07,749 He looked away. She lay a while contented in the sun, and, having slithered down among the lily, 431 00:51:07,750 --> 00:51:12,640 piled into the water with her muscled waves began to scoop up clouds of mud, 432 00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:19,630 hunks of knotted weed and twigs, and have a little rascal shaped nest with built the top of it. 433 00:51:19,750 --> 00:51:27,130 She flattened, then formed into a shallow dish, and then she laid a clutch of perfectly loosened eggs, 434 00:51:27,610 --> 00:51:32,110 each one with a dark column of life coiled inside it. 435 00:51:38,390 --> 00:51:45,410 In reflecting about the way the animals, real and imagined, inhabit my psychic life, 436 00:51:45,860 --> 00:51:56,660 I am reminded of this wonderful statement by the French intellectual George but-I the animal is not closed and inscrutable to us. 437 00:51:57,200 --> 00:52:02,870 The animal opens before me, a depth which attracts me and is familiar to me. 438 00:52:03,200 --> 00:52:08,210 It is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me. 439 00:52:08,720 --> 00:52:15,080 That which deserves the name death. And which means precisely that it is unfathomable to me. 440 00:52:18,080 --> 00:52:21,830 The first poem in my second collection is called Squids on It. 441 00:52:22,640 --> 00:52:32,120 It recalls an incident when I was at Cambridge, a headland and beach on the public peninsula in Dorset, the place I go to for inspiration. 442 00:52:32,690 --> 00:52:37,130 And I was walking along one of the long stony spits that goes far out into the sea. 443 00:52:37,580 --> 00:52:44,750 And I saw a small squid lying just under the surface of water, staring straight into my eyes. 444 00:52:51,180 --> 00:52:58,490 The look. You shot me. Milk Blue Squid of Cambridge was one of recognition to you. 445 00:52:58,500 --> 00:53:06,300 I must have seemed an ogre, the kind that mothers warn that children of something in you stiffened, 446 00:53:06,690 --> 00:53:14,159 and the whole wild treble clef of you leapt five foot clear of the water, then vanish to the blood. 447 00:53:14,160 --> 00:53:18,090 Iraq. Love you. As I did, I would have been the death of you. 448 00:53:18,570 --> 00:53:27,149 And so half honoured and half humbled. I went back along the beach to the obsessive clink of fossil hunters hammers and the bird and 449 00:53:27,150 --> 00:53:33,540 buggies over the bridge and up the narrow foot long palms where the eyes of people coming down, 450 00:53:33,930 --> 00:53:37,800 declining to meet one of those returning to that cause. 451 00:53:40,620 --> 00:53:49,560 My third collection, The Remains, was written after the death of my parents and quite a lot of other important people in my life. 452 00:53:50,460 --> 00:53:58,110 It emerged somehow from the huge collection of broken china pieces that I dug up from the years when I was making my garden. 453 00:53:58,800 --> 00:54:04,530 It felt somehow that having buried my parents, I was unearthing a new set of ancestors. 454 00:54:05,070 --> 00:54:11,190 I became so adept at finding them that I could detect them poking through the earth after a shower. 455 00:54:11,760 --> 00:54:21,780 Here is a small sample of them. I want you to have a look and one I'm going to get from contact. 456 00:54:21,960 --> 00:54:28,400 I'm not going to do them. No, no. Let's meet with them a while. 457 00:54:29,220 --> 00:54:35,340 I was taking away and this this appears and this is true from within the pattern. 458 00:54:35,850 --> 00:54:40,710 He is unhappy because he knows he's going to be put to death because he's fallen in love with the emperor's daughter. 459 00:54:40,980 --> 00:54:46,200 I found that in the morning and in the afternoon I found this lovely little purple girl's feet. 460 00:54:46,590 --> 00:54:54,510 And I believe that there is Alice in Wonderland shoes when she's talking to the caterpillar who's making the whole cup on top of the mushroom. 461 00:54:54,510 --> 00:54:59,520 RAMONA And then another nice thing was my daughter, Miriam. 462 00:54:59,520 --> 00:55:08,810 My obsession with broken anythings was having a holiday in Greece, and she got her babies to look for things among the among the sand. 463 00:55:09,300 --> 00:55:10,860 And she found these pieces. 464 00:55:11,120 --> 00:55:22,349 What is so lucky about them is that these are Greek fragments and they look Mediterranean in the way that absolutely nothing I pick 465 00:55:22,350 --> 00:55:32,490 got from my father jokes that that lovely sort of open yellow and this sort of bugs him and these kind of wonderful gorgeous. 466 00:55:33,810 --> 00:55:40,590 Anyway, once again, I'll use I'll use these pieces to make the design for the cover of my book. 467 00:55:40,980 --> 00:55:44,970 And having started to paint again, I can't I really couldn't bear to stop. 468 00:55:45,660 --> 00:55:48,990 I painted a number of pictures that have been included in the book. 469 00:55:49,530 --> 00:55:53,880 This one? Yeah. Going to do the right thing here. 470 00:55:54,690 --> 00:56:01,920 Yeah. This one is of my husband's hands holding two Worcester apples. 471 00:56:03,540 --> 00:56:10,529 When I finished the book, I discovered not only do I want to paint, but in fact I need to. 472 00:56:10,530 --> 00:56:15,540 I feel complete. I feel quite incomplete if I don't have a painting on the go. 473 00:56:16,380 --> 00:56:18,990 And although I've made paintings all my life, 474 00:56:19,680 --> 00:56:28,620 I often spoilt them or weakened them somehow towards the end by rushing too fast and wanting to accrue too quickly. 475 00:56:29,070 --> 00:56:35,129 And perhaps because I've been dazzled for so long by my father's work, I didn't apply to myself. 476 00:56:35,130 --> 00:56:41,520 But painting with the kind of diligence, passion and commitment that would have made it exciting enough for me. 477 00:56:42,840 --> 00:56:49,290 Since the book was published, I've been painting in earnest without needing the justification of a collection of poems. 478 00:56:49,920 --> 00:56:56,790 I find myself free to enjoy the thrill of very hard work, probably for the first time in my life. 479 00:56:57,090 --> 00:57:00,900 And painting is hard work. You have to put in the hours. 480 00:57:01,140 --> 00:57:07,980 You have to get to know the structure, texture, quirks and secrets of your model. 481 00:57:08,220 --> 00:57:17,790 You have to handle resistant materials. You have to have exacting standards, prepare the surface, deal with mess and stickiness, 482 00:57:19,560 --> 00:57:25,080 breathing in the fumes of turpentine, mixed colours make each brushstroke tell. 483 00:57:25,530 --> 00:57:31,860 Pay attention to the different registers of the composition and think about how you're going to interpret them. 484 00:57:33,330 --> 00:57:36,390 Go to bed in despair and get up in despair. 485 00:57:36,420 --> 00:57:39,150 Deal with your own incompetence and exhaustion. 486 00:57:39,660 --> 00:57:47,730 Also, painting requires a very particular kind of energy, determination, even ruthlessness in that sense. 487 00:57:48,130 --> 00:57:52,750 When I paint it different, when I paint a different part of me is engaged. 488 00:57:53,080 --> 00:58:01,810 Everything is deliberate, solid material made by my hand and by my desire in principle. 489 00:58:02,050 --> 00:58:09,430 A poem can be written on the back of an envelope or even a bus ticket, using the words that might be spoken when buying a bottle of chocolate. 490 00:58:09,970 --> 00:58:18,220 And while my poems become ever more dear to me as time goes by, once I finish the painting, the action and the excitement are over. 491 00:58:18,370 --> 00:58:26,740 And I just want to get on with the next one. What I'm trying to say is that my poetry composition and picture painting are not easy partners. 492 00:58:27,940 --> 00:58:33,130 Another of my most recurrent dreams is that I discover a new room in the house. 493 00:58:33,730 --> 00:58:39,370 It's not as strange as it may seem. Houses have their complexities and limitations, 494 00:58:39,370 --> 00:58:47,680 and the space could have perhaps remained hidden behind a partition wall or any significant door which could have been painted over. 495 00:58:48,160 --> 00:58:51,340 The dream, when it happens, is always new and fresh. 496 00:58:51,730 --> 00:58:59,530 A door that I somehow missed opens and I find a marvellous empty space free of clutter and devoid of history. 497 00:58:59,860 --> 00:59:04,270 I enter with joy and claim it for myself. It is my favourite dream. 498 00:59:05,080 --> 00:59:11,620 I wrote this poem for him before the very final deadline of handing in my completed manuscript. 499 00:59:12,070 --> 00:59:15,570 But I have to say, it's a bit. It's a poem. Been writing all my life. 500 00:59:22,090 --> 00:59:28,270 The room isn't there. Sometimes I dream I'm in a room that isn't there. 501 00:59:29,020 --> 00:59:32,500 The many years I've lived here not noticed it before. 502 00:59:32,950 --> 00:59:38,020 An unexpected boom. Such blessed emptiness is going to change my life. 503 00:59:38,380 --> 00:59:42,520 What should I use it for? And Grey, the morning comes, I wake. 504 00:59:43,000 --> 00:59:47,590 The rooms are as they were. Each one with its function and its mess. 505 00:59:48,130 --> 00:59:54,640 And all this time, it dwells behind the door. A simulacrum of my mind, my womb, my unlived life. 506 00:59:54,640 --> 00:59:58,780 My life to come. Or could it be life? Then that brings me here. 507 00:59:59,140 --> 01:00:05,980 Treading its naked boards, sitting at a table on a wooden chair and rushing to the window to take in the view. 508 01:00:06,370 --> 01:00:10,150 The trees outside. Spring. The blossom on the grass. 509 01:00:19,320 --> 01:00:25,640 At the beginning of this year, I began this painting, Hidden Day, 1933. 510 01:00:26,540 --> 01:00:34,129 It's based on a very small photograph of the house my paternal grandparents used to rent for summer holidays on the Baltic Island, 511 01:00:34,130 --> 01:00:37,880 hidden there, where their three sons could play happily outdoors. 512 01:00:38,570 --> 01:00:42,680 They were German Jews and left Germany for Britain in 1933. 513 01:00:43,700 --> 01:00:50,060 I've had the photograph in my possession for a long time and I always thought that one day I would use it to make a piece of work. 514 01:00:50,720 --> 01:00:56,090 The meaning for the photograph for me is this although it was probably taken shortly before 515 01:00:56,090 --> 01:01:01,280 Hitler came to power and in some ways represents the most terrible suffering and loss. 516 01:01:02,150 --> 01:01:09,020 The image of the modest cottage bathed in sunlight with its untidy cobbled yard littered with household objects, 517 01:01:09,350 --> 01:01:13,730 celebrates informality, domesticity and freedom. 518 01:01:14,360 --> 01:01:19,550 The cottage is no longer there, but I will visit hidden, say for the first time this coming autumn. 519 01:01:20,900 --> 01:01:24,140 I'm okay to go on. Okay. Yeah. 520 01:01:24,950 --> 01:01:27,500 Here is another poem that also came from a dream. 521 01:01:28,730 --> 01:01:40,160 I find myself standing in an area enclosed by sets of double, double steel doors like you see on the top floor of a sort of posh department store. 522 01:01:40,760 --> 01:01:50,629 And a woman in a sort of official clothing came towards me and told me that I had been recruited to take part in a sort of national 523 01:01:50,630 --> 01:01:59,630 service where I would be taken down to the centre of the earth and then brought up again a bit like a sort of the astronauts mission, 524 01:01:59,630 --> 01:02:04,130 except in reverse or going down rather than up and down. 525 01:02:05,750 --> 01:02:11,900 And then when I began working on this poem, is this even the Order of life was it was an induction. 526 01:02:12,830 --> 01:02:19,400 All of life was an induction, such as you get when you start a new job or when you're prepared for an operation in hospital, 527 01:02:19,820 --> 01:02:25,610 you know, going to the dentist, going to a party, going fear to get you on a plane, getting on a train, 528 01:02:25,610 --> 01:02:31,190 starting a new relationship and adjusting everything seemed to be, Oh, you don't know what's going to happen anyway. 529 01:02:31,280 --> 01:02:37,959 This is the poem induction, which was a new book and a joke on my way around it. 530 01:02:37,960 --> 01:02:41,450 Yes. Induction. 531 01:02:42,440 --> 01:02:46,910 I am here to welcome you and to help you prepare for it's about to happen. 532 01:02:47,600 --> 01:02:53,540 I can see that you're hoping that we've decided to call it off for today, but I'm afraid that's something we never do. 533 01:02:54,380 --> 01:02:57,440 We consider ourselves very lucky that you're here at all. 534 01:02:58,010 --> 01:03:03,590 And our years of experience, of tortures. It's always better to go a go ahead as planned. 535 01:03:04,400 --> 01:03:08,240 First, at the risk of repeating what has already been said in the letter, 536 01:03:08,660 --> 01:03:12,350 you have been personally selected for this by people who know what they are doing. 537 01:03:12,830 --> 01:03:17,899 We have no doubt in your ability to cope and the chances of anything going wrong with technical 538 01:03:17,900 --> 01:03:25,070 front are so minuscule as to render any concern you may have as insignificant at this point, 539 01:03:25,070 --> 01:03:30,230 we usually offer a glass of water as you won't be taking anything with you once the doors are closed. 540 01:03:31,040 --> 01:03:39,150 Secondly, that is the silence that governs our practice. There has been some debate in the public domain about why up to now we haven't 541 01:03:39,170 --> 01:03:43,610 opted for the so-called virtual route and looked at ways of mimicking reality. 542 01:03:44,060 --> 01:03:53,720 The consensus is that absolutely nothing beats real human beings, the richness of their emotional responses, that capacity for facing the unknown. 543 01:03:53,960 --> 01:03:59,980 It's truly humbling. And our concern for the integrity of any data we do gather is genuine. 544 01:04:00,500 --> 01:04:03,620 In return, our job is infinitely more rewarding, 545 01:04:03,920 --> 01:04:10,100 knowing that we're doing our utmost to secure your level of cooperation and make you as comfortable as possible. 546 01:04:10,550 --> 01:04:17,480 I think that's everything. Comfort. If you would kindly undress in one of our cubicles, your protective clothing is ready for you to put on. 547 01:04:23,210 --> 01:04:26,990 And it came long before I ever thought. 548 01:04:27,170 --> 01:04:34,460 I have my poems republished. I dreamt that I found a book of poems lying in the gutter outside my house. 549 01:04:34,970 --> 01:04:42,980 It was called a rare London Cheese's. And it was sort of it was kind of blackcurrant colour and the lettering was sort of custard yellow. 550 01:04:43,370 --> 01:04:49,640 And I picked it up and discovered that it was a book I had written. I was simply wonderful experience. 551 01:04:49,670 --> 01:04:57,530 Apparently, lots of poets do dream about that. Anyway, then I woke in my actual bed and put up my hand to pick the book up. 552 01:04:57,530 --> 01:05:00,590 And of course it wasn't there. And here we go. 553 01:05:00,740 --> 01:05:11,610 This is the poem. Rare London Cheese's rarity. 554 01:05:11,830 --> 01:05:19,000 Must have been all down to keep design alive and me as I follow after a butterfly. 555 01:05:19,510 --> 01:05:27,249 Looking forward to the moment when our record is yellow. And this Saturday it will stay with me for nothing more than out of the sun. 556 01:05:27,250 --> 01:05:31,360 Surprised me with its heat and that the sea was a blue I'd never seen before. 557 01:05:32,320 --> 01:05:40,750 If I mention London, it's because of Delamere. The sadness in the backs of terraced houses, the chimney pots and attitudes of strife, 558 01:05:41,260 --> 01:05:49,510 the feathered discolouration of the render and the way each window seems to be leading its own relentless seeker to life. 559 01:05:50,260 --> 01:05:53,920 She's commands respect. It has ancestral status, 560 01:05:54,520 --> 01:06:03,790 it is aspirational and suggests connoisseurship that would exasperate wait not for the greed with a swathed in musty or dripping ashes, 561 01:06:03,790 --> 01:06:08,219 they will change your humour and London cheeses. How can I ever say what you think? 562 01:06:08,220 --> 01:06:15,820 This one Red on the Cheeses is the title of a book of poems that picks up in a dream from the culture of my street. 563 01:06:16,390 --> 01:06:22,210 I opened it and felt the jolt of publication as I scanned the intention of the scope with every line. 564 01:06:22,900 --> 01:06:36,370 A moment later, I awoke to find it wasn't that nor these words, nor my name on the spine, and I refer indulge poem to a painting by my father. 565 01:06:36,850 --> 01:06:45,900 This one, called Waste Ground was houses to me is one of the absolute masterpieces of 20 years of 20th century poetry. 566 01:06:45,910 --> 01:06:55,240 That paintings actually in my in my mind. And that's that's how that how I happened to write the second stanza of that book. 567 01:06:56,660 --> 01:06:57,090 Okay. 568 01:06:59,320 --> 01:07:11,140 Really, at the end, I want to I want to introduce this poem by saying something about subject matter and meaning and subject matter, meaning of poems. 569 01:07:11,680 --> 01:07:17,110 T.S. Eliot wrote that the chief use of meaning in a poem, in the ordinary sense, 570 01:07:17,860 --> 01:07:28,210 may be to satisfy one habit of the reader to keep his mind diverted and quiet while the poem does its real work upon him, 571 01:07:28,690 --> 01:07:32,319 such as the imaginary burglar is always provided. 572 01:07:32,320 --> 01:07:39,100 It was a nice piece of meat for the house dog and some years ago I attended an interview with Paul Muldoon, 573 01:07:39,580 --> 01:07:44,320 who said that when he writes a poem, he really doesn't know what he's doing. 574 01:07:44,800 --> 01:07:48,160 And I found that so incredibly enlightening and helpful. 575 01:07:49,840 --> 01:07:56,860 After my mother died, I found dozens of her notebooks in which there were lists of, 576 01:07:56,860 --> 01:08:03,129 and I'm quoting here, romantic boys names, favourite dishes, girls names, 577 01:08:03,130 --> 01:08:06,340 beginning with I and beloved French actresses, 578 01:08:07,120 --> 01:08:14,710 an ambition of ambition form to write a list poem and then watch nothing but the things listed I thought should die. 579 01:08:14,770 --> 01:08:17,770 Can I die? Is it going to be okay? 580 01:08:17,830 --> 01:08:22,420 Anyway, I did it. This is it. Here we are. 581 01:08:27,430 --> 01:08:31,200 Okay. There's a little bit of technical for although I have to go. 582 01:08:31,420 --> 01:08:39,010 I'm going to concentrate resource nobody and lose that piece of all. 583 01:08:39,580 --> 01:08:49,810 VB. We've seen American Baudelaire's vessels that market dear worth tactile meuniere 584 01:08:50,080 --> 01:08:58,570 fishermen of African formula homeland decathlete A.T. formed you blizzard chassis. 585 01:08:58,750 --> 01:09:06,840 You should take supersu footy attitude it to on to shop people with a rubbish plant. 586 01:09:07,390 --> 01:09:12,340 But you do that yourself. But wasn't split but more clear. 587 01:09:24,390 --> 01:09:28,310 But trying to get that. Sorry to slow it up a bit. 588 01:09:31,510 --> 01:09:36,120 Why don't I? Oh, here we are, signore. 589 01:09:44,480 --> 01:09:49,640 So it's just a little bit tricky to get you, right, signore? 590 01:09:54,170 --> 01:09:59,700 W. Here we go. Signore W Seymour Mogul. 591 01:10:00,070 --> 01:10:12,080 Opposing third year shuffle the masses more or the home Julia Bardo Deneuve Cazares Birkin. 592 01:10:12,380 --> 01:10:17,090 You pale a journey. Umu Gaspar Binoche. 593 01:10:18,260 --> 01:10:19,750 Thank you for listening.