Philosopher Noga Arikha spent 18 months at the Pitié-Salpêtière hospital in Paris, studying what happens when the mind goes wrong – and how our physical experiences inform our identities. Weaving together stories of her subjects’ troubles, from Vanessa who wakes from a coma having forgotten ten years of her life to Thomas, who no longer knows how to answer questions, in The Ceiling Outside Arikha draws on cutting-edge research and insights from neuroscience philosophy and psychology as she attempts to understand how deeply interconnected are our minds and bodies. In conversation with author Lisa Appignanesi.

In Association with the Rabin Chair Forum of The George Washington University.

Noga Arikha is a philosopher and historian of ideas. The author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (2007), she is associate fellow of the Warburg Institute and honorary fellow of the Centre for the Politics of Feelings, London, and research associate at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. She is based in Florence, Italy.

Lisa  Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, cultural commentator. She was President of English PEN, Chair of the Freud Museum London, and until 2020 Chair of the Royal Society of Literature of which she is now a vice-president.  Her non-fiction includes Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love and the prize-winning Mad Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800; Freud’s Women (with John Forrester); a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir and The Cabaret. She is also the author of an acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead and nine novels, including The Memory Man (which won a Holocaust Fiction Prize)  and Paris Requiem. She has written for The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and other papers.