Voices, Memory, Forgetting

The Memory Network is co-organising a day-long series of presentations titled ‘Voices, Memory, Forgetting’ at Durham Book Festival in October in partnership with Hearing the Voice, a Wellcome Trust-funded medical humanities project that is investigating auditory verbal hallucinations. A team of leading psychologists, cultural theorists, writers and journalists, including Will Storr, Carolyn-Jess Cooke, Charles Fernyhough and Eleanor Longden, will explore the reliability of human memory, our powers to forget, and the role of memory in situations of emotional distress and creative transformation.

The day will be split into three sessions, which are programmed to develop an interdisciplinary debate, and include opportunities to participate in memory-writing experiments and meet other memory researchers. The morning session, ‘Hearing Voices, Returning Memories’, will address the relationship between voice-hearing, hallucination and memory – what memories are attached to voices, real and imagined, and what role should we give to the role of memory in first-person accounts of psychosis? Following this, Carolyn-Jess Cooke will speak to Pat Waugh and discuss the relationship between fiction, memory and outer-limits of the normal. And finally, Charles Fernyhough and journalist Will Storr will the consider contributions made by both scientists and non-scientists in the definition of the real.

A Full List of Participants:

Richard Bentall is Chair of Clinical Psychology at the University of Bangor in Wales, UK and author of Doctoring the Mind: Why Psychiatric Treatments Fail (2009).

Lisa Blackman is Professor in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research concerns experiences of embodiment and mental health and she is the author of Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (2012).

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is author of The Boy Who Could See Demons (2012)

Charles Fernyhough is a Professor of Psychology at Durham University, Director of Hearing the Voice, a novelist, and the author of the award-winning Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory (2012)

Eleanor Longden is author of Learning from the Voices in My Head and leading a figure in the global Hearing Voices Movement.

Will Storr, novelist and an award-winning longform journalist, is the author of Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (2013)

Patricia Waugh is one of the UK’s leading literary theorists and Professor of English Studies at Durham University. She is Co-Investigator of the Memory Network.

Angela Woods is Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Co-Director of Hearing the Voice.  She is the author of The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (2011).

Tickets for  ‘Voices Memory Forgetting’ can be purchased from the Gala Theatre Box Office for a small, nominal fee.

In association with Hearing the Voice and Durham Book Festival.