Battle of Ideas
SOUL ON THE SLAB VIDEO. A film of a discussion at the 2013 Battle of Ideas with Bill Durodié, Geraint Rees and Sally Satel, with chair Claire Fox.
ReadTag: Self & identity
The madeleine effect
For the Frenchman Marcel Proust, the elixir of memory might have been a petite madeleine, but that wouldn’t work on British-bred me. What I needed was a can of Heinz cream of mushroom soup and a packet of Sainsbury’s cheese and onion crisps. As I gathered these and other long-neglected childhood foodstuffs from the supermarket shelves, I thought surely one sniff, one taste would be enough to take me right back. But to what, exactly? And how?
ReadShould we embrace change?
Heraclitus is famous for one simple and powerful aphorism: you cannot step into the same river twice. Everything is in flux, nothing remains the same. And what was originally an observation about nature has now become an imperative. We must innovate. The technological revolution is without end. If it’s not new and improved, it’s old and obsolete.
ReadWhat can dreaming tell us?
Life is therefore like a dream, not because it is an unreal nothing, but because it is a very real something which will vanish into nothingness the moment our consciousness ceases.
ReadWhy do I always do that?
Over-generalising is a basic human need. Little wonder then that we are quick to apply “always”, even to ourselves – whom we imagine to be more consistent and coherent than most of us actually are.
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