After our look at neuroscience and emotions, we're moving on to consciousness, identity and memory in our latest Edinburgh festival podcast.
We couldn't be in better company in considering such weighty matters than Professor Susan Greenfield, the distinguished neuroscientist and broadcaster. She talks to Richard Lea about the brain activity that adds up to consciousness and how, set in context, it adds up to an identity.
Away from the rigours of the laboratory, Greenfield is also looking at questions of identity from a broader angle in her debut as a novelist, 2121: A Tale from the Next Century. Established novelist Marcel Theroux is coming at similar questions from the opposite direction, with a new novel - Strange Bodies - in which he imagines a procedure where a human being's essence can be distilled from their words. The two discuss their findings.
A foundation of consciousness and a building block of identity, memory also provides the subject for Evie Wyld's new novel, All the Birds, Singing, whose narrator has travelled halfway around the world in flight from her past. She talks about how her characters seek out "ways of not remembering things".
Reading list:
2021: A Tale from the Next Century by Susan Greenfield (Head of Zeus)
Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux (Faber)
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)
