Speakers: Guy Leschziner, Bidisha, Alastair Santhouse

A psychiatrist and a neurologist walk into a book festival. Not the start of a joke, but of a fascinating hour as two experts help us to make sense of the mind and to mind the senses. Radio 4 presenter and The Nocturnal Brain author Dr Guy Leschziner returns with The Man Who Tasted Words: Inside the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses. He explores how they construct our perception of the world around us, including case studies such as Bill Oddie’s musical hallucinations and Paul who has never felt pain. In Head First: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of Mind and Body Dr Alastair Santhouse, former Royal Society of Medicine psychiatry president, asks what does it mean to be well? Is it something in our body, or is it subjective, something of the mind? With brutal honesty, deep compassion, and a wry sense of humour the consultant psychiatrist at Guy’s and the Maudsley examines difficult cases that illuminate some of our most puzzling and controversial medical issues, as we start to grapple with the longer-term impact of the pandemic. They join Bidisha in conversation.