The discerning reader’s essential read
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FiveBooks Interviews
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. She says our conscious perception of reality is very different from reality. The conscious intention to make a movement occurs several hundreds of milliseconds after the ‘readiness potential’, the brain’s preparation to move. In other words, your brain starts to produce electrical signals which prepare the movement before you have the conscious intention to move. Our brain is constantly making us do things, but our conscious experience is actually constructed afterwards.
Jessica Pryce-Jones has spent more than two decades advising companies on how to achieve happiness in the workplace and proving the difference it makes to productivity. She is the CEO of human asset management consultancy iOpener and the author of Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital For Success. If you’re an employee, she’d love you to take part in this survey on your own happiness at work.
Dorothy Rowe is a psychologist famous for her groundbreaking and bestselling books on overcoming depression. Her recents subjects include phobias, sibling relationships and structures of belief. In her next book, Why We Lie, she explores the importance and dangers of our fantasies. ‘Interpretations are impressions,’ she says. ‘They are all guesses and theories, and they can easily be invalidated. When you come up against a major invalidation, such as happened to Alan Greenspan when the financial system was threatened with collapse, you simply feel yourself falling apart. Greenspan aged terribly during that period.’
Author and veteran journalist Simon Winchester, OBE, wrote the bestselling and definitive work on Krakatoa – The Day the World Erupted. During his journalistic career at The Guardian, Winchester covered events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate scandal. As an author he has written or contributed to over a dozen non-fiction books and written one novel. He lives on a farm in Massachusetts. He tells FiveBooks that a lot of art and poetry has been both intentionally and inadvertently based on volcanic eruptions and that the world sometimes just has to let off steam.
David Carmel is a research scientist at the Carrasco Lab, part of New York University’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science. His area of research is Consciousness, with an emphasis on visual awareness. For example:Say you show volunteers written words, very briefly, and ask them to evaluate whether or not the words carried some emotional impact. The emotional words can be positive (for example, “holiday”), negative (“murder”), or neutral (“jacket”). It turns out that people are better at detecting negative than positive emotional information; interestingly, this is true even when the volunteers are shown words so quickly that they can’t consciously identify them – they're guessing about the words’ emotionality, but do so correctly a little above chance level when the words are negative, while remaining at chance for positive words. This pattern of results tells us that we can extract information from words we cannot consciously see, and furthermore, that we have evolved to be more sensitive to negative, potentially threatening information.
Tom Shakespeare is a senior research fellow at Newcastle University and a consultant at the World Health Organisation, specialising in disability, bioethics and the arts. He writes a regular column at www.bbc.co.uk/ouch and is a member of Arts Council England.
Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 2001 he won the prestigious Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society, awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research made by a mathematician under 40. In 2004 Esquire magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential people under 40 in Britain. In 2009 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Faraday Prize, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science. He received an OBE for services to science in the 2010 New Year’s Honours List. He wrote and presented a four-part landmark series for the BBC called The Story of Maths. He has a regular column in The Times called Sexy Science.
Anthony Seldon is a contemporary historian, political biographer and educationalist. He has written books on Churchill, Thatcher, Major and Blair and has recently argued for the need to tackle the collapse of trust in British public life. As Master of Wellington College, a major co-educational public school, he has pioneered lessons in happiness and well-being for teenagers.
Jim Al-Khalili is a scientist, author and broadcaster. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey.
Donna Dickenson writes on medical ethics, the study of morality and ethics as applied to medicine. Her latest book, Body Shopping, is about the market for human tissue and the ethical issues involved in buying and selling the parts of the human body. Donna Dickenson is also an activist, working with the NGO The Corner House (which deals, among other issues, with female rights in the field of biotechnology), and establishing the Network for European Women’s Rights. Her outstanding contributions were acknowledged when she was awarded the prestigious Spinoza Lens award in 2006, which celebrates those who have contributed to public debate about ethics and morality.