EVENTS & CONVERSATIONS
26 April 2022: A conversation with Katerina Fotopoulou, online at the Royal Institution. Watch here.
3 May 2022: A conversation with Antonio Damasio, online at the HowTo Academy. Watch here.
25 May 2022: A conversation with Vittorio Gallese, live at the British Institute Sotto, Florence.
27 May 2022: A conversation with Shayla Love, online at the Harvard Bookstore. Watch here.
7 June 2022: A “digital dialogue” with Ophelia Deroy, online at The Philosopher. Watch here.
3-14 October 2022: Talks, class visits, events at Notre Dame University as writer-in-residence.
14 October 2022: A conversation with Barak Gaster, live at the Computational Neuroscience Center, University of Washington, Seattle.
19 October 2022: A conversation with Lewis Lapham, hosted by the Janus Society for Lapham’s Quarterly, New York, NY.
25 October 2022: A conversation with Lisa Appignanesi, online at the Freud Museum, London, 17:00 BST. Watch here.
16 November 2022: A talk at the Richardson Seminar, online at the Weill Cornell Medicine DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, 14:00 EST / 19:00 BST. Watch here.
14 March 2023: A conversation at the American Library in Paris, with journalist and writer Rachel Donadio. Watch here.
15 March 2023: A conversation at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, with psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Muzaffar Husain, chaired by psychologist and psychoanalyst Stephen Blumenthal. Watch here.
INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS & ARTICLES
“Bridges to the Future” podcast with Matthew Taylor at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts): “Mental Illness and Identity”, 19 April 2022.
Article for Psychology Today: “Feeling Better, Thanks”, 28 April 2022.
“Five Key Insights” from the book on the Next Big Ideas Club, 10 May 2022.
Interview with The Takeaway, NPR (US): “Author Noga Arikha Explores Memory and Identity”, aired 11 May 2022.
Interview with Joe Humphreys, The Irish Times: “Can Someone with Dementia Access a Deeper Kind of Wisdom?”, 12 May 2022.
Interview with Michael Shermer on the Michael Shermer Show,The Skeptic, 28 May 2022
Conversation with Serge Prengel on “The Embodied Mind”, Active Pause podcast, July 2022
“Five Books”: Conversation with Nigel Warburton about the five best books on Philosophy, Science and the Body
Interview with Ben Upton, Times Higher Education (paywalled), 15 September 2022
Article for the Institute of Arts and Ideas: “When memory fails, imagination fails with it”, October 2022.
A conversation with Roberto Trotta on the Sidecar podcast, 9 December 2022.
PAPERBACK OUT
ORDER ON AMAZON UK / US / FR / IT - BUY IN INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOPS
As her mother slips into the fog of dementia, a philosopher grapples with the unbreakable links between our bodies and our sense of self.
A diabetic woman awakens from a coma having forgotten the last ten years of her life. A Haitian immigrant has nightmares that begin bleeding into his waking hours. A retired teacher loses the use of her right hand due to pain of no known origin.
Noga Arikha began studying these patients and their confounding symptoms in order to explore how our physical experiences inform our identities. Soon after she initiated her work, the question took on unexpected urgency, as Arikha’s own mother began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
Weaving together stories of her subjects’ troubles and her mother’s decline, Arikha searches for some meaning in the science she has set out to study. The result is an unforgettable journey across the ever-shifting boundaries between ourselves and each other.
Reviews (click on links to read more):
An “extraordinary exploration of selfhood, which blends humane sensitivity with acute philosophical insight … consistently arresting”
Julian Baggini in The Wall Street Journal
A “gripping exploration of mental illness and consciousness”
Claire Messud in Harper’s
One of “6 audiobooks to listen to now”: reader Fenella Fudge “makes this moving account of the self and its unraveling both relevant and accessible for all of us”
Lauren Christensen in The New York Times
This book is an eloquent and informed plea not to reduce ourselves and others to categories: the ill and hale, the sane and the mad, mind or body, inner or outer. It is a clarion call to a more holistic approach and to find meaning and even beauty in apparent loss or decrepitude.
Salley Vickers in The Literary Review
“a gripping confluence of the personal and the scholarly that is able to offer up an unusually holistic exploration of the way selves are lost, and found, under the auspices of modern medicine” … “Arikha has a gift for making scientific technicalities digestible by baking them into irresistible narratives and wise reflections”
Kathryn Tabb, American Scholar
“an ode to vulnerability – of our sense of self, of the science of selfhood, of life.”
Suparna Choudhury, The TLS
“A luminous, intellectually dense meditation on mind”:
starred Kirkus review
Advance praise:
“Noga Arikha is a poet and a painter with the soul of a scientist. Trust her to guide you through a study of suffering and healing that will leave you humanly richer and, wonder of wonders, at peace with yourself.”
Antonio Damasio, author of Feeling and Knowing
“Noga Arikha is that rare author whose deep knowledge of philosophy, science, and the arts allows her to move deftly from the quandaries of medical diagnosis and the scientific ideas that inform them to the intimate narratives of people afflicted with illnesses that threaten the coherence of that mysterious thing we call ‘a self.’ Astute, compassionate, and brilliant, The Ceiling Outside is finally an adventure story in the bewildering drama of being.”
Siri Hustvedt, author of Memories of the Future
“With grace, rigour, and imagination, Arikha brings together the languages of mind, brain, and embodied human experience to give us a book that fascinates on every page.”
Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad
"A moving journey to the roots of the self, which uniquely combines the author's deep knowledge of its neuropsychological foundations with a touching humanistic sensibility. A must read."
Vittorio Gallese, author of The Birth of Intersubjectivity
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