The tone for today was perhaps a lot heavier and more
challenging than I’d previously experienced, inviting me to look into my own
mind as much as those of the day’s speakers, and this happened right from the
get-go with Jonny Benjamin’s talk The
Kindness of a Stranger. There’s no denying how difficult and delicate the
topic of suicide is to discuss, which is why he kindly gave us an ‘escape
clause’, but as he remarked, being ‘brave enough to be vulnerable’ isn’t easy
either. So, as Benjamin began his talk, I was already looking at him with a
great degree of respect because of how vulnerable he was allowing himself to be
before this room of strangers. But also, remembering the words of Robert
Rowland Smith from yesterday’s talk on humanity, how much more human this made
him. He talked us through his gradual descent into mental illness as he grew
up, from visual and auditory hallucinations as a child to his experience of the
Truman Show delusion to being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder which was
‘the end of my world’. At this point, he considerately stopped to assure us
that ‘this story does get better. I promise’ as if giving us the strength to
survive what was to follow: the story of his attempted suicide. And indeed, it
did get better because, as he explained, on the bridge he was prepared to jump
from he met a man who told him two things no one had ever said to him before: ‘You
don’t have to be embarrassed’ and ‘I think you’ll get better’. This stranger
had given Benjamin more hope than anyone ever had. Which wasn’t to say that he
immediately got better, but he began to wonder why no one seemed able to talk
about and treat mental illness with the ease and importance of physical
conditions like broken limbs, heart disease, or cancer? Eventually he launched
a social media campaign to try and find his unlikely saviour, and was surprised
by the number of people – ‘silent heroes’ as he referred to them – who came
forward, having allegedly done a similar thing for others that same day. But in
the end, he found him, a man named Neil Laybourn, and the video of their
meeting honestly made me tear up. Together, Laybourn and Benjamin have done
incredible things for mental health awareness and services, even in the space
of the tiny venue. Benjamin’s most profound remark for me, however, was that we
don’t say we are cancer in the way we
say we are depressed. If we learn to
say we have a mental health
condition, it no longer defines us, but simply lives alongside us.
As a brief interlude from the mentally heavy stuff, I went
to see Mark Williams’ Frameworks
which discussed something physically heavy: the historical development of skeletons.
This required Williams to condense 4000 million years of history down into 40
minutes – a task he somehow managed without going over time. Beginning, as you
do, at the beginning, he introduced us to the earliest skeletal creatures,
stromatolites, formed by clumps of bacteria whose rocky fossilised remains can
still be seen today. This was a world of ‘blobs eating other blobs’ until those
blobs decided to join up to form creatures like sponges and gradually become
more resilient, against each other and the environment. This meant very
experimental skeletons - ‘humpty dumpty skeletons’ as Williams’ called them –
were formed, the kind whose remains could not be put back together again
because they were just so weird! Eventually
we arrived at insects and molluscs and the story of Ming the potentially
immortal clam. Ming, named after the emperor in whose rule he was born, was
fished out of the sea at a little over 500 years old – and thereafter, died.
One wonders how old poor Ming might’ve lived to be. Which brought us to another
aquatic skeleton, the biggest in the world (and no, it isn’t the blue whale):
the Great Barrier Reef! Coral is a skeleton, and yet that too is being killed.
Even our nearest and dearest skeletal relatives, the apes, only exist in
numbers at most equal to the total population of Leicester (this was the
relative comparison Williams drew for us). But it wasn’t all doom and gloom,
because when considering the future of skeletons, there were two points to
make: that vehicles have essentially become our new ‘skeletons’ and that, so
long as there are the right chemicals on other planets, there will be life out
there.
With my head still spinning at the possibilities, I was soon
back in the Barn for Susan Blackmore’s talk on consciousness. Far from the ‘Black’
in her name, she appeared as a rather exuberant and colourful figure who,
throughout her talk, encouraged a great deal of audience participation. This primarily
involved asking every member in the front row at odd intervals if they were
conscious, but also included bringing a man on stage to ‘be a bat’, and
questioning the sentience of various objects and organisms. The point she
wanted to make was that consciousness was an illusion and that we were all ‘deluded’
– a point emphasised by her having an existential crisis over a piece of
carpet! This was because there was no identifiable point in the brain which was
‘you’ – we can understand the function of every part but it seemed that the
more we knew, the less we actually knew (is your brain hurting yet?) She
applied several tests to her audience, including an attention test which
tricked us into not seeing a man in a gorilla suit pass through. She then
amended her question to ‘What were you conscious of a moment ago?’ which only
made our brains hurt more. I will, in this case, leave you with a quote by
William James: ‘The attempt at introspective analysis…is in fact like seizing a
spinning top to catch its motion or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to
see how the darkness looks’. Our attempts to explain the unexplainable, to give
form to the formless (as Nick Hunt did for the wind), are only ever going to be
met with futility. Which is probably why, when asked what consciousness is,
Blackmore simply screamed ‘I don’t know!’
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