Garrick (00:49.346) Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Garret Jones. I'm one of the co-authors of the book, The Curious Advantage, and I'm delighted to be joined by Noga Arakar. Good morning, Noga.

Noga Arikha (01:03.668) Good morning. Lovely to be here.

Garrick (01:05.406) Welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast. We've got so much to talk about. You're a philosopher and a historian of ideas. And you work as a science humanist. You're multidisciplinary, which is why I find you so fascinating. You're fostering dialogues between neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, social scientists, humanists, and artists. And you've also written multiple acclaimed books and currently working on a biography of the anthropologist France. Hang on. You will.

You've also written multiple acclaimed books and currently working on a biography of anthropologist Franz Boas. I'd love you to tell me about your journey. I'm going to not use that term. I'm going to change that. You've also written multiple acclaimed books and currently working on a biography of anthropologist Franz Boas. How did you come to all of this?

Noga Arikha (01:59.372) Goodness. Well, it all began in Paris, where I grew up, perhaps. I did tell the story a little bit in my latest book, the one, The Ceiling Outside, The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind, which came out about just over a year ago. And thank you. And I did tell the story at the beginning because it's the story as the book is about the mind, the brain body.

Garrick (02:06.286) Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Garrick (02:16.846) Pretty good.

Garrick (02:24.526) Mm.

Noga Arikha (02:26.012) nexus really and the sense of self, the embodied sense of self. And these are questions I started asking myself when I was really a child. I think I've always been weirdly obsessed with consciousness and, you know, what is the self and how do we think and how does it all work? But I was never good in math. I was terrible at math. And in France, if you weren't good at math, you could just forget about even going and thinking of going into biology or anything like that, or even medicine. I think I would have been probably a good doctor.

Garrick (02:42.986) Mm.

Noga Arikha (02:55.988) But that didn't happen. And so inevitably ended up, I went to Britain, I'd studied at Mid-Morning, I'd graduated all my studies in London, and I studied first philosophy and the analytical mode. Of course, it was the nineties, London, it was very analytic.

Garrick (03:10.482) Exactly, good old fashioned Anglo-American philosophy, lots of maths.

Noga Arikha (03:16.34) Yeah, and it was just very, it was basically the remnants of logical positivism. And I studied that along with German, which was a degree they had to create for me because there were no connections between the two disciplines at the time. But then I realized quickly that even though what I liked most in my philosophy degree were I guess ethics and philosophy of mind, but what I really quickly realized that...

Garrick (03:23.898) Mm.

Garrick (03:31.714) Hehehe

Noga Arikha (03:46.304) the questions of philosophy were just, you're just biting your own tail. There was nothing feeding the conceptual argumentation. And so after some other journeys, I mean, my journey is actually a bit more complicated than all that, but basically after a while and going to America and working with the neocritical books and doing this and doing that, I ended up going to the Warwick Institute and did their MA.

Garrick (03:49.73) Hmm.

Hmm.

Noga Arikha (04:12.372) history of ideas about the Renaissance, and then did my PhD on the mind-body relation in late 17th century. So I went into the historical arena, early modern period, post-17th century, I could still call it my century, because when you go into these things, you choose your period and you stay there in a way, even though I'm no longer doing actively any research at all in that area. But the time of the sense of revolution, of the revisions about...

Garrick (04:30.091) Hmm.

Noga Arikha (04:41.104) ways of looking at the mind which were suddenly mechanistic and the problem of the soul, what do you do with the soul, to me were equivalents to the ideas, to the anxieties that were floating around, especially then, in the late 90s, about consciousness that were being debated in the cognitive sciences, even though people there were not reading history.

Garrick (04:44.171) Yes.

Garrick (04:57.09) The um...

That's right. I mean, I love the Warburg Institute. We've interviewed and had Bill Sherman, who's the director at the moment, on this podcast. And we like to think of the Warburg Institute as a home of curiosity sometimes because you really find fabulous people doing incredible research to an amazing level of detail. And it's beautifully open. It doesn't have to be, you know, in one metter. You can work across all the all the diverse.

areas, it's wonderful for that. I'm interested in just to talk briefly about the mind and that was a revolution of moving from a mechanistic. Where has it settled in your mind? What's the mind-body relationship and human behaviour? What's the current thinking do you think?

Noga Arikha (05:45.9) Okay, so this is where I think a historical approach, just to segue on what we were just saying before, but the Warburg, which I am very Warburg in that sense, I think the genealogy of ideas is essential to understanding where we are now. And so I think where we are now, we are back, let's say, we've returned after a period of high cognitivism that followed on the behaviorism.

Garrick (05:59.811) Hmm.

Garrick (06:13.675) Mm.

Noga Arikha (06:13.956) of the earlier part of the century and the mid-century, even though there is still a lot of cognitivism that is now within the AI, artificial intelligence research and so on, we have returned to the late 19th century burgeonings of scientific psychology. When you were really, when people realized that it was possible to study, but let's say William James, just to say one big name.

Garrick (06:28.448) Yes.

Noga Arikha (06:42.324) that you could really study the subjectivity in scientific terms, that these questions were no longer, were not just metaphysics. The questions about what the self is and how we feel and things like that. We're not just about metaphysics. You could actually use physiology, you could actually use empirical research to understand these things. So that began then. Then, as I just said, there's all these various phases in the 20th century that took us away from it. And that one, in a sense,

culminated in a kind of return of the old dualist model that preceded all that, the dualist mind-body split that Descartes had really consolidated tremendously in the 17th century, which is why that had interested me. And that dualist split, I think, was still active in the cognitive times, in the sense there was a kind of almost disembodied brain that people were studying, as if it did not.

Garrick (07:16.304) Mm.

Garrick (07:35.636) Mm.

Noga Arikha (07:42.036) belong inside the body. And that, I think, is a kind of dualism. It's a kind of brain-body dualism. And so now we've returned to the much more integrated organism. That is, the feeling organism embedded in the world. All these models now, which I find very, very rich and interesting and fertile, and that are being used now more and more, even though it's not yet mainstream knowledge. I think people still have a very strong dualist

Garrick (07:43.23) to anything else.

Garrick (07:54.507) Hmm.

Garrick (08:11.35) Yeah.

Noga Arikha (08:11.376) instinct without knowing that they do. So all these are basically this is where we are now. So we have that, we have that in the science, we have a kind of new data that is filling in the intuitions of phenomenology. I think a lot of phenomenology is back,

Garrick (08:27.134) Yeah, meroponetio for sure. It's fascinating, I had a wonderful conversation yesterday with a data miner, a sort of deep mind friend of mine, who we were talking about AI and cognition. He said two things which were struck with me. I mean it's a bit aside but it connects because he said don't mistake fluency for intelligence in AI.

Noga Arikha (08:51.645) Right, exactly.

Garrick (08:53.058) just because things seem fluid doesn't necessarily mean they're intelligent. And he said, why would we try and reproduce the intelligence of the human in mechanical form? Because we're so inefficient and we're so soft and we make so many mistakes. What do you think? He said we need a new kind of cognition to develop, which was his idea going forward.

Noga Arikha (09:16.512) But I think we are, I think the name AI, I can't remember who said that, is a misnomer. It wasn't even supposed to be called that. It caught on, but it's actually a very big misnomer. I think it's also breeding a lot of confusion. People think it is artificial intelligence. There's nothing intelligent about these machines. They're just, it's true, it's efficiency at mining data and at reproducing patterns. I think that's what it is, right? So I don't, yeah, those are big, big questions that are being, yeah.

Garrick (09:22.579) That's right.

Garrick (09:32.273) That's right.

Garrick (09:36.254) Yeah, that's right.

Garrick (09:44.758) Big question, exactly. How has your interdisciplinary approach shaped your perspective on the human mind and its complexity?

Noga Arikha (09:51.668) But it's more the other way around. It says that for me, I got very impatient with the academic structures. That's why I didn't really have a mainstream academic career. I'm a little bit sort of feeling that. Because I just didn't feel like... The division between disciplines, to me, was always absurd. And also, again, maybe why I liked the early modern period, where there was no such division between disciplines. So, you know, just as when I was, you know,

Garrick (10:00.311) Yeah.

Garrick (10:08.791) Yeah.

Noga Arikha (10:20.336) scientists working on mine never studied history or not much of it and weren't aware that their questions had a historical depth to them. So the people working, you know, at the Warburg, for example, at the time, I was the only person reading contemporary philosophy and contemporary science. So I read a lot of contemporary science now. I've decided to call myself, you mentioned it, a science, I love the way you just said it as if it were, I called myself a science humanist. I decided to coin that

Garrick (10:38.998) Hmm.

Garrick (10:45.034) Mm.

Noga Arikha (10:49.244) appellation because I thought this is actually what it is. I mean, I'm obsessed with scientific research, obviously the good stuff, and I've read a lot of these papers, and I try to keep up on this, and very few human humanists or people outside the scientific fields actually bother, which is a great shame.

Garrick (10:55.127) Yes.

Garrick (11:04.714) And it's huge. The reason it's attractive to me is when you talk about the scientific method and you can go back to Bacon and the development of the scientific method, which kind of underpinned everything. And yet these kinds of approaches, like the basis of science and rational thinking in an irrational world are completely under threat, if you like. The idea of science itself is being challenged by the religious right, for example. And...

Noga Arikha (11:33.695) Oh it is.

Garrick (11:34.71) because it creates a different world. What's your view on the scientific method and how we protect it or where it's going?

Noga Arikha (11:47.848) That's a big question. I think certainly education is hugely important. And I think a much stronger integration of science from an early age, even in cohorts of people who are not studying science is absolutely necessary. So you need to have, again, a much more multidisciplinary view bred into kids from a young age.

Garrick (11:55.886) Mm.

Garrick (12:08.374) Mm.

Noga Arikha (12:14.992) I was participating in a friend's project, she's a philosopher in Munich, on the communication of science. It was called Persuading Under Uncertainty, it was a fellowship she created for the year where we had very interesting discussions about what it takes to actually make sense understood to the wider public.

Garrick (12:15.254) Yep.

Garrick (12:35.47) Mm.

Garrick (12:41.216) Mm.

Noga Arikha (12:43.592) which is an essential thing to do. And it must be done not de haut en bas, not from specialists down to the poor people who don't understand complexity, but actually the other way around. We need to, and that's what I try to do in my own work, is to turn a lot of these rather extraordinary revelations, in a way, even however temporary they are, or always incomplete they are, that are bred within, by scientists with their work.

Garrick (12:45.761) Yes.

Garrick (12:53.349) Mm.

Garrick (13:10.456) Yes.

Noga Arikha (13:11.904) to turn them into much more human language, to start really integrating the two, the human with the data, which is the hardcore stuff. The hardcore stuff is never neutral. So that's one of the problems as well. It's never bred within a neutral environment. There's always a context to the production of science and to the question of science. And people don't really aware of that. So they think that it's all, you know.

Garrick (13:14.722) Hmm.

Garrick (13:25.626) Mmm.

Garrick (13:34.059) Yes.

Garrick (13:40.526) that's all neutral and it's all pure. It's pure, but it's not. Yeah. And then we have the issue of it's not critical thinking because there's also commercialization which skews academia quite a lot sometimes. And you've got people paying for professorships and research and so on.

Noga Arikha (13:41.312) It has to be all or nothing. They want absolute answers. Therefore, they don't get absolute answers, they throw it all away. And you have to teach them it's not. Sorry.

Noga Arikha (13:56.78) There is. Yeah.

Noga Arikha (14:02.572) Where is that? I mean, there's all sorts of things that happen. So it's not it's not it's not simple.

Garrick (14:05.654) The kind of commitment. No, it's not simple. The world is complicated. But the commitment to pure science and the idea of purity itself is all problematic. But the idea that there is a neutral plane in which we are investigating the world, it's been fascinating for me the last five or six years, because there's been a huge trend on the organizational business side, where behaviorism has really come back. But it's, in a way, this whole idea of learning by doing.

and the idea that organizations are learning, organizations, they're learning systems, has become huge and mostly probably informed by the advent of the internet and that puts these cycles in place. But at the same time, there's this trend for learning by doing, being in the world, to be critical or to not to accept things unless you can test them or prototype them or understand things. It's that idea that we only learn by doing.

Noga Arikha (14:49.983) OOF

Garrick (15:05.83) And how does that relate to you? What does that, I mean, what's your reaction to that?

Noga Arikha (15:14.784) Well, I think there are two sides to this. I mean, one, either there's an excessive dogmatism with regard to the need to not be able to even tend to our intuitions, which is a problem. But the other side is accepting that we are embodied, embedded, you know, the 4E philosophy, you're embodied, embedded, inactive, and I always forget one of the 4Es philosophy. This idea that we are always in an environment

Garrick (15:26.005) Hmm.

Garrick (15:39.787) Yes.

Noga Arikha (15:44.32) constant dynamic interaction between body, brain, environment, and each other. It is never an isolated self. And so inevitably, everything we're doing is always as, again, embedded in the environment, such a way that we are receiving inputs and putting things and generating knowledge in that way. And I think that makes sense in a way. I mean, you need to.

It's almost like thinking of the whole world and of all learning as increasing our affordances in a way. To use the notion of affordance, I think there's a bit of that maybe in that idea, which is not... Which makes sense. It's learning here and now, attending to our emotions in the here and now, which makes sense. Yes. Yeah, which is the one I missed. I always miss one.

Garrick (16:18.251) Yes.

Garrick (16:33.502) I was looking up the 4E theory while we were talking, which says, cognition does not occur exclusively inside the head, but is variously embodied, embedded, enacted or extended by way of extra cranial process. Why do you think you forget extended?

Noga Arikha (16:50.756) Extended, I always forget the extended for some reason, yes.

Noga Arikha (16:57.14) No idea. I forget a lot of things these days.

Garrick (17:04.631) So you use the process of bringing together neuroscientists, specifically clinicians, humanists and artists as well as fascinating for collaborative.

Noga Arikha (17:12.48) Well, that's what I'd like to do more. I mean, this is all right now, only talk. I've interacted with quite a few artists who are very, very interested in things like, you know, shared spaces, empathy, you know, a lot of issues that are studied by scientists, like Perry organized a webinar on Perry personal space as well, this idea of the space around us, how we actually do process that.

Garrick (17:17.003) Yes.

Garrick (17:26.829) Yes.

Garrick (17:42.606) Mm.

Noga Arikha (17:42.96) neurologically. And a lot of these artists are not aware again of the research on, especially the research that interests me a lot is on interoception, which is the sense of the body from within, the sense of the internal ongoings in the organism, which is really a sense. It's very important and it informs all our emotional states and our interactions.

Garrick (17:54.445) Yes.

Garrick (18:10.412) Hmm.

Noga Arikha (18:11.148) or a sense of well-being or the opposite. And that informs also, therefore, also the way we are experiencing artistic events, in a sense. And I think there's a very little awareness, again, of this scientific work or of any scientific work amongst the artists who are working. Now, there are some projects of art science. There's quite a few of them. But again, it's not mainstream, to put it this way. So.

Garrick (18:32.575) Mm.

Noga Arikha (18:40.76) And yeah, so and I think that the other aspect which I think is really important to emphasize is that together with this sort of research and this end of the, which I hope in a way, is the end of the dualist temptation, is the much acceptance also of emotions as integral to everything, or into rationality. So you said before you were, I was thinking about this when you said before, you know, that

Garrick (18:58.423) Yeah.

Garrick (19:09.631) Yes.

Noga Arikha (19:10.72) We need the science in an irrational world. Sure, it's an irrational world, but you know.

Emotions are part of rationality. They're part of reason. We know this from the past few decades, starting with Damasio's work, how without emotional processing we're not capable of even evaluating judging or anything like that. So we really need to get and realize how integrated this whole thing is and turn really

Garrick (19:19.202) Yes.

Garrick (19:25.251) Hmm.

Noga Arikha (19:42.088) let's say, accept that emotions can be center stage in our self-definition as human agents. And because that old contraposition of emotion and reason, which goes back to Plato, I suppose, is not helpful, has not been helpful. And you can see it in action throughout the political world. So that's another project I have now is to create a project on emotions in politics. To do that here, yeah.

Garrick (19:55.715) Mm.

Garrick (20:06.286) That's fascinating because those philosophies or even those ways of reasoning have an impact in the world and politics and you say, leading to unhelpful outcomes or even unhelpful situations. Yeah, for sure. Do you ever put it in a gender thing? Would you?

Noga Arikha (20:21.812) Very, well, we can see this happening.

Garrick (20:30.842) you know, some people say, oh, we've been in high patriarchy, and so it's highly rational. Now we're shifting into something which is more emotional.

Noga Arikha (20:39.792) Yeah, yeah, one can. One can. And one can. I mean, it's never black and white, right? It's not so simple either. And I don't want to be reductive about these things. But I think at some level, sure. Yes, I think at some level. Yeah.

Garrick (20:48.392) For sure. I remember... No, not at all.

Garrick (20:56.598) I remember being at a think tank once where Antonio de Maza was there and he was up against one of the big cognitive scientists and computer scientists at Cambridge. And they went head to head and the idea that they went around was, will it ever be possible to upload a human into a computer? Which is a great question. And of course, the computer scientist said, yes, of course, it's all about data, blah, blah.

And Demasio said, well, absolutely not. We are emotional. And we are the sum total of the emotions that we experience on a daily basis and throughout our life. And you cannot upload that. And the fact that you cannot upload that means the essential part of our being human would never be able to be uploaded. I thought that was fun.

Noga Arikha (21:45.204) I'm 100% on the Damasio side. I mean, he's an interlocutor, he's a friend. And I think that what he had kickstarted, he and his wife, actually, Hannah Damasio as well, and their teams, kickstarted some decades ago, has really been very fertile. I think the research on inter-reception that I was talking about just now before comes out of that. And you could even argue that at some level, well, it's part, let's say, of the.

Garrick (22:07.956) Yeah.

Noga Arikha (22:14.028) what's called the effective turn in neuroscience that happened in the nineties. There was Joseph Ledoux as well, who was really important at that time. You know, he works quite differently. Antonio's, D'Amazio's contributions, I think, also very, very interesting also in how he looks at our, at these emotional processes or feeling processes, he distinguishes between emotion and feeling.

Garrick (22:16.823) Uh huh.

Garrick (22:38.758) Yes.

Noga Arikha (22:40.02) of coming really out of, you know, we are evolved organisms. I mean, I think a lot of the problems in our self understanding begin when people forget that we are evolved biological organisms and we're much still closer to single cells than we are to hardwired machines. We are a collection of evolved single cells. We have evolved out of that and of those, as Demasio showed beautifully, of those, you know, creatures and we started with, you know, perception.

Garrick (22:56.926) Mm-hmm. Mm.

Noga Arikha (23:09.492) reaction in the environment and gradually our nervous system, if you like, became more complex and ended up being also about reaction to internal events. But really, while we are all still reacting to external events all the time, so we are in a constant dynamic relation with the environment and the homeostatic processes that work to maintain our body within

Garrick (23:16.92) Yeah.

Noga Arikha (23:38.528) a viable range within a changing world is what actually ends up making us who we are and the emotional creatures we are. So in a sense, so think of machines as, we're not at all just data crunching machines. Our sense of self is not all about what we know, never was. And in my book, one of the aspects of the book was also about my mother's dementia.

Garrick (23:44.618) Right. And a very narrow

Garrick (23:55.863) Yes.

Garrick (24:05.72) Hmm.

Noga Arikha (24:05.92) she started developing a dimension of what I was writing and well, it started to appear when I was writing and one realized, yes, the sense of self, her sense of self in a sense remained, I mean her identity remained even though she forgot everything because her affective self was intact, untouched and that's what is the core. So you know, it's a very sad view of

Garrick (24:22.77) Yeah, she still had the... That's... That's so... Thank... Yeah.

Noga Arikha (24:34.208) human life to think they were just data crunching machines with no subjective experience. I mean that's very behaviorist, that's really returning to the 50s.

Garrick (24:38.204) Thanks.

It's pretty sad. What about, I don't want to call it the metaphysical, but what about the idea of the self beyond the physical? You can go completely scientific and say there are electromagnetic impulses that we communicate with at another level and we may not be aware of. But you could also say that there are transient quantum effects. So what do you?

Noga Arikha (25:09.652) Yeah, people do. There's also theories.

Garrick (25:11.945) Yeah, all these theories about us beyond just being in the body.

Noga Arikha (25:17.072) I'm, yeah, I don't feel the need for that.

Garrick (25:20.114) Okay. Good.

Noga Arikha (25:22.156) I, you know, again, those are the questions that have no answers really, so that I accept and make kind of agnostic.

Garrick (25:29.074) I know, but I'm interested in things like psychic awareness. For example, how is it that people can know and do they know? You know, the work of Rupert Sheldrake, for example. How does your dog know that you're coming home, you know, when you're 11 miles away, these kinds of things? We don't know. That's right.

Noga Arikha (25:40.302) Yes.

Noga Arikha (25:44.725) We don't know, but there's a lot about physics. We don't know. I think we don't need metaphysics. Physics is complicated enough.

Garrick (25:52.389) Isn't that true? That is the point.

Noga Arikha (25:53.48) I mean, that's the point, right? I mean, we call metaphysics ultimately what we don't know about physics in a sense, which is what enables us to say I don't know. I mean, I think even communication, look, even language, how is it that we are able to communicate ideas in the forms of words that are just basically vocalizations of how does this work? How does any of this, what we're doing now work? Look, even to be able to communicate on a screen, I mean, the perception of this 2D image that actually translates as a, you know, all this, how the hell does this work?

Garrick (25:58.178) That's right.

Garrick (26:11.702) That's right. Exactly.

Garrick (26:22.23) It's that. No, we don't.

Noga Arikha (26:24.456) We don't know how we're experiencing it. We don't know half the story. So that's enough in a way. You don't have to posit anything positive to the fact that we don't know. We just don't know, I think. I think it's great not to know. But you know, again, curiosity, since this is about curiosity, I think it's all about precisely keeping that curiosity alive to be aware of it. If you don't have the curiosity, you don't know what you don't know, you become an idiot.

Garrick (26:33.678) And it is good not to know, because it is great not to know, part of curiosity.

Noga Arikha (26:48.552) I mean, you don't, right? I mean, you exactly, right? I mean, if you need to be able to always ask yourself how does that work? And if you don't have the answer, it's fine. But at least ask the question.

Garrick (26:49.112) He said, we start as idiots and we end as idiots.

Garrick (27:01.09) got some, I've got a curious question about art, just to go back to art. Who are the artists that you are intrigued by at the moment? Living or dead?

Noga Arikha (27:14.364) Oh, God, that's a really difficult question. I just was at the Biennale in Venice. It was the architecture Biennale, but I saw the show at the Ponte della Dogana from the Pinot collection. And there were some really interesting people. Actually, the person I find really interesting right now, and again, I don't know if you know if it's art or not, doesn't really matter. It's this Korean artist, Kim, I forget her name, so I'm sorry, who makes these films of herself standing in a city, in a road.

Garrick (27:21.056) Yes.

Garrick (27:26.114) Yeah.

Noga Arikha (27:42.604) and Kim something and she's very, very interesting indeed. Because precisely, the experience, because it's about the experience, first of all, it's a kind of experiment and it kind of partly sociological experiment, but a bit more than that. What is it to be looked at? Who are the people looking at you in the street? And what are the reactions? I mean, you can see the different streets. The ones that were on show there were in Shanghai.

Garrick (27:47.48) And why do you find her interesting?

Garrick (28:11.981) Yes.

Noga Arikha (28:20.757) um New Delhi and New York and the complete differences in modes sorry

Garrick (28:28.184) Is it Kim Soo Ja? Or is it Young Sun Kim?

Noga Arikha (28:33.892) No, but it'll come back to me, it doesn't matter. And then at the same time, there's this, the camera is standing behind her. So it's almost like if you identify with her, you think of yourself standing in front of people and you think of the back of you. And it does expand your awareness of you and interaction with others in urban space. And I find that

Garrick (28:35.876) All right.

Noga Arikha (29:01.82) just very, very compelling. I was, again, I don't know if it was art or not, I just very much, all the pieces there, I find that quite striking. But there were some beautiful paintings of Agnes Martin who I've always loved. I saw the Rothko show in Paris, and of course, you know, it's very, very moving indeed, even though each painting is an experience in itself, so seeing too many is actually a little bit counterproductive, but still it's wonderful to have.

Garrick (29:19.202) So moving.

Garrick (29:29.55) It's overwhelming. And in that space.

Noga Arikha (29:31.432) to see that show. And otherwise, I don't know, you know, just walking around the Titians and academia, you know, it's always, especially seeing again, just now the last painting of Titian, the Pietà, which is probably, I think, one of the most moving paintings in the world, I think. So that again, it's just, it's almost too much. So it does, yeah.

Garrick (29:45.482) Yeah.

Garrick (29:52.354) So, that's.

Garrick (29:56.438) Why did it blow you away?

Noga Arikha (30:01.985) It really does. Yes. And I grew up, my father was a great painter, so I grew up very much in that.

Garrick (30:11.362) I'm going to do the intro now, so just forgive me for while I'll do this. Nogarika is a philosopher and historian of ideas. We're talking to her and she works as a science humanist, fostering dialogues between neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, social scientists, humanists and artists to bring to a general audience accessible account that analyze the origins of our deepest concerns about our embodied feeling and thinking selves.

Noga pursues study in German and philosophy at King's College London, later earning a PhD from the Warburg Institute on Nature and the Mind. Her diverse career includes roles in New York as a fellow at the Italian Academy and teaching positions at Bard College. Her acclaimed books, Passions and Tempers, Napoleon and the Rebel, and The Ceiling Outside, showcase her prowess in historical narratives. She is also currently writing a biography of anthropologist Franz Boas as part of the Jewish Lives series.

Can I ask you about Napoleon and the Rebel? I mean, there's a huge Ridley Scott film coming out, which has got massive acclaim. And I think everybody's going to, it's going to be a big hit, another kind of epic. What is it about Napoleon? And...

Noga Arikha (31:25.128) This is the book that I co-wrote with my then husband while I was pregnant with our first child when we were in New York. It was a kind of fun parenthesis in a way, because it's nothing to do with anything either I do or he, he's a Renaissance historian. But it was a fun project to do. It was on Lucien Bonaparte, who was the brother, the only intelligent brother in the sense of Napoleon and who was one who challenged him and turned down offers of...

being king of anywhere because he wanted to stay with his beloved bourgeois, non-regal wife. So it's a wonderful story that we thought at one point should be a film, but that didn't happen. In a sense, I mean, I suppose now that I'm writing this, I'm not at all a biographer, I was commissioned to write this biographer, Franz Boas, and I was realising just the other day

Garrick (32:09.029) Mm.

Noga Arikha (32:21.032) while writing. Well, I suppose, yes, I did write a life of Nusaym al-Apartheid as well. It's a very different exercise from dealing with ideas, but it's actually really good to go into the, try to go into the mind of someone in the past and reconstruct history through their story, reconstruct a time, a very interesting time through this story. So that's in a sense what I can say and very intrigued by this Ridley Scott film. I didn't know it was coming out now.

Garrick (32:39.234) Yes.

I love Barber Feeds actually. I really do.

Garrick (32:49.746) It's coming out in November. Do you... One of the best books I've read, actually, one of the best books I've read in my life, which was part of my summer reading last summer, was by a guy called Benjamin Labatut, and it was called When We Cease to Understand the World. I wonder if you'd come across it. I'm going to send you the link. Benjamin is an Argentinian who wrote this book in Spanish, and it's been translated. It's a very thin book.

Noga Arikha (32:51.69) Yeah, yeah, very soon.

Garrick (33:19.994) understand the world and it's about six physicists who have changed the world but essentially changed the theory that underpinned physics so you could include Einstein in there, Niels Bohr and there's some others so it's about they recreate a completely new way of understanding the world.

when the world ceases to have meaning. They destroy the old, they create something new. But the fascinating thing about this book is that process has a huge impact on them personally and on their bodies and on their lives. And this book is a story of unintended consequences, incredible genius, but at the same time the tragedy accompanies each of them and each of their lives as they reconstitute the way of seeing things. Beautiful book. I'm going to send you that link.

Noga Arikha (33:56.46) Okay.

Noga Arikha (34:13.644) fascinating. I'd love to read that. I'd love to read it. Yeah, when he says to understand the world, it's a great title, I have to say. Since so much we try to spend, I'm trying to understand. I mean, Franz Boas was a very, is a wonderful person who really changed the way you understand the world and really undermined completely. I mean, he's the one who really...

Garrick (34:17.398) when we cease to understand the world. It's just great. Yeah.

Garrick (34:30.144) Mm-hmm.

Noga Arikha (34:39.952) Yes, put it into the biological racialism that was so prevalent at the time, and of course became even worse. But he really did manage to come out, to show up how wrongheaded these theories were, and worked through empathy as well, and that was very important. So he's an incredibly interesting figure, and in a sense, today I think he would have been perhaps a psychologist. He was really interested in

Garrick (34:41.43) came up with a new way of doing things.

Garrick (34:48.691) Yes.

Garrick (34:58.283) Yes.

Garrick (35:08.823) Yeah.

Noga Arikha (35:09.78) the human mind and what was universal about the mind and where cultural difference came from. And so in a sense, and the question I'm also asking is, how far down does the cultural difference go into the biological substratum, if you like? And I think it goes quite far down. I think I'm a more and more constructivist in that way. I mean, there is a universal nature, but we do have the cultural, the cultural is very important to

Garrick (35:13.666) Mm.

Garrick (35:32.12) It's completely...

Noga Arikha (35:39.296) Duel brings so much to the table. I mean, he's an incredibly important figure. He really is the founder of cultural anthropology without whom so many ideas we have today wouldn't even exist probably, without whom the discipline wouldn't exist as it does now. And so, and I'm realizing how important it is also for the work I'm doing now in the, because I'm now affiliated with the European University Institute here in Florence. And this is a context in which I'm...

Garrick (35:42.551) Yeah.

Garrick (35:51.008) Yes.

Garrick (36:02.234) Ah, yes.

Noga Arikha (36:05.944) now starting to create this whole programme on emotions in politics. And associating that with this project we have of a democratic odyssey to create permanent citizens assembly in the European Union. Which is a huge effort that has started there. And that is, that I think requires also the input of psychology and the considerations of how emotional we are.

Garrick (36:20.814) Ah, fascinating.

Noga Arikha (36:33.572) especially in our political interactions as political animals. And so that's one thing where I'm trying to put all these areas together, you see. So this is, it does fit, but there are, as I said, as, yes, there are always consequences to ideas.

Garrick (36:33.612) Yes.

Garrick (36:49.006) What do you mean by that? There are always consequences to ideas.

Noga Arikha (36:50.972) That's what you were saying before about the book you were mentioning. You were saying that, I mean, yes, I mean, people work with, ideas are more concrete than we think they are, you know, because if you think of again, of Boas and of the ideas about race that he was fighting against, you know, they had major consequences, concrete applications. And as you can see it now, foot, you know, in the Middle East, you know, what people believe, what you believe is true about something.

Garrick (36:54.245) Ah, the impact, yes.

Garrick (37:02.283) More impact for the world.

Garrick (37:07.37) Yes.

Garrick (37:10.934) Huge. That's right.

Noga Arikha (37:21.472) can really change the reality on the ground.

Garrick (37:21.794) especially when it's linked to... That's right, I mean I came out of South African context and the fight against apartheid there, which was really coming out of a set of theories that were in the 1890s, and sort of created a hierarchy and people accepted them as science and anthropology. The problem in South Africa is that they encoded it into law, and then slavery, I mean any form of slavery has the same kind of bias.

Noga Arikha (37:35.966) Exactly.

Noga Arikha (37:43.945) Exactly.

Noga Arikha (37:49.012) It does. And that's why Boas is so important, because he really fought against that, exactly at that time.

Garrick (37:51.755) Yes.

And this idea of politics and emotion that you want to bring into government, how might it play out, do you think? What's the dream?

Noga Arikha (38:04.004) I think it's part of my general agenda in a sense of bringing to bear this work, this incredibly rich work happening in the scientific community, now especially to do with effective neuroscience and psychology, to try to understand exactly how we function as intersubjective beings, and this happens very much in the political realm as well.

Garrick (38:13.791) Hmm.

Garrick (38:25.422) Mm.

Noga Arikha (38:31.068) how we react to each other, these things, and I try to really put together disciplines that don't talk to each other at all, people who are working in policy, tend not to have any training at all in psychology or any awareness that, for example, emotions have become centre stage in the way we have to define ourselves. They're still functioning very much according to a kind of, at least the remnants of a kind of cognitivist framework.

Garrick (38:56.362) Mm.

Noga Arikha (38:57.2) Rational choice theory is still kind of the starting point for a lot of elaborations, training in political, even negotiation. And I think that we need to really change the way we do these things. And that could actually have an effect on how we practice political action.

Garrick (39:04.11) Thank you.

Garrick (39:18.223) I really wish you all the very best with that programme and project. May you have lots and lots of success putting that together. How do you personally define curiosity? Let's talk about that for a bit.

Noga Arikha (39:23.156) Thank you.

Yeah.

Noga Arikha (39:33.273) The wish to go beyond our comfort zone.

Garrick (39:38.127) Okay, I love it.

Noga Arikha (39:40.044) I think to jump beyond what we know and what we feel comfortable with. And it's a very, it has to be a little bit.

Garrick (39:44.331) Hmm.

Garrick (39:48.534) Hmm. Why? I mean, I agree with you, but why would you say it has to be a little bit uncomfortable?

Noga Arikha (39:56.272) A little bit uncomfortable, otherwise there's nothing new.

Garrick (39:59.158) Yeah, exactly.

Noga Arikha (40:00.896) It does have to be, it's uncomfortable negatively, so perhaps.

Garrick (40:03.786) I love that. We were doing the research about curiosity. There are lots of roots, but one of the Greek roots for curiosity is Istres, which of course is the cycle. But then it also relates to the idea of the gadfly constantly annoying the cow in the field. And I love that. Exactly. He was the gadfly.

Noga Arikha (40:21.884) Right. Osocrates constantly annoying people in the agora. He was the gadfly, poking questions to get people out of their entrenched positions.

Garrick (40:33.462) The pearl in the oyster, the bit of grit, the thing that actually causes the irrational makes us look again at what we know or think we know. The question. What are you personally most curious about right now?

Noga Arikha (40:44.136) Yes, the questions, the questions always.

Garrick (40:54.378) other than everything.

Noga Arikha (41:00.412) I don't know everything all the time, it's true. Right now, I'm still so concentrated on finishing the book, I think I'm just curious about how, about this, how I'm going to, how, you know, about the details of Boaz's life in the very, in my own little present. I'm also, in the University of the City Institute, it's a very new world for me, you know, policy makers and so on.

Garrick (41:20.086) Hmm. Are you finishing the mic?

Noga Arikha (41:28.572) And so that my curiosity is every day when I'm interacting with people who have never had a chance to interact with before, people are working on the ground in a way that is fascinating. And yes, I'm curious also about how to put together, as I said before, the ideas now always work in theoretical sort of talking mode. How these pan out in the world of action. It's something that now I actually have a chance to test this, and I want to just see how it works.

Garrick (41:28.587) Yeah.

Garrick (41:47.73) Mm-hmm.

Garrick (41:52.972) Mm.

Noga Arikha (41:57.536) how we can interrelate. I thought it was what am I curious about? I'm curious about my children. What are they going to become? I'm curious about what ageing does to us. Curious about other people's curiosity. I'm interested in other people's curiosity, actually.

Garrick (42:04.526) That's right.

Garrick (42:13.461) Both things I'm interested in. I was fascinated by one of the reasons we got to this thing about curiosity was we were asking the question, what the hell do we teach our children and our grandchildren going forward with the digital realm is so narrow when you compare it to nature, for example, and the overwhelming amount of data we get from just being in the world.

But the digital realm is so, now how do you enable these kids to keep on keeping it broad and open and being critical and distance and that brought me to curiosity. Keep them curious.

Noga Arikha (42:49.9) That's a very, very important question. I think the important thing maybe also is teaching them to be curious again. Because the digital world, as you said, I mean, it's true. I mean, I think that they tend to be enclosed in these very addictive activities. And they're not curious about the world. I mean, I think that they're, I have a feeling that curiosity is no longer, I don't know if I ever, how much, has it always been the case? We don't know. But it's true that,

Garrick (42:57.037) Yes.

Garrick (43:03.694) Sure. That's crazy. My godson.

That's right.

Noga Arikha (43:19.5) Curiosity is the mark of the open mind, of the open world, of the open society. And if you're not curious, I mean, one thing I always tell my children is the one question I don't wanna ever hear in this household is, I speak French with them, Saint-Mater-Espas, it doesn't interest me. I don't wanna ever hear that. I said something that my father always used to tell me, he was a great polymath, is everything can be interesting, everything.

Garrick (43:21.89) Yes.

It is.

Garrick (43:37.036) Ha ha ha!

Noga Arikha (43:48.232) Everything, the coffee I just had, you know, all the flavors of the coffee, where it comes from, how it was made. Send it out.

Garrick (43:54.347) There is that idea, that at every level, no matter how small something you look at, there is an infinite amount of something to be understood there. Just have to look.

Noga Arikha (44:05.68) sort of thing. And our relation to the natural world, that is probably the most urgent thing we can be curious about. It's not idle curiosity, maybe the difference, the question is also as what's the difference in idle curiosity and productive curiosity.

Garrick (44:11.437) Yeah.

Garrick (44:19.318) Our definition is we believe in having an attitude of wonder, but a spirit of exploration. And for us that's the curiosity. The two go hand in hand. What's over the hill? Well, let's climb the hill and get there. That's what my...

Noga Arikha (44:27.956) That's right.

Noga Arikha (44:35.916) But that's something also that's also in a sense, also in political situations, there's always the enactment of what's called the exploitative exploration, exploitation trade-off. The two attitudes are always there within all animals as well. What is it safest to go and explore? What is it, is it more worth exploring and getting new food, for example, and risking your life? Or is it best to not get new anything and at least not risking anything?

Garrick (44:48.651) Yes.

Garrick (44:59.831) That's good.

Noga Arikha (45:05.296) So again, the comfort zone or beyond the comfort zone. And what do we choose to do now? Do we stay conservative or do we explore?

Garrick (45:05.952) Thanks, bye.

Garrick (45:15.155) Survival is often about exploration because if change comes immediately and you haven't explored, then you don't have enough of the tools required or the thinking tools to understand what you could pivot to. For example, if there's the old story about lions in Africa hunting zebra, and if the zebra get wiped out in a drought,

They can only survive if they learn how to hunt something else, say buck, quickly. And it's that ability to pivot. You know, sorry, I was just triggered by it. And there's that idea that ants as well send out, you know, scouts, not only to find the...

Noga Arikha (45:48.117) Yes.

Garrick (46:08.482) I had a friend who used to put it from the Big Bang to the Big Mac, you know, the ants if they find the Big Man, they all swarm around it. But if they if the rain comes and washes the Mac away, unless they've sent out other smaller units to find other food, they have a problem. So it's that idea of always it's part of our survival. Great way of putting it. They really are. We're also good at putting our heads in the sand.

Noga Arikha (46:27.028) Right. It is.

True, humans are very good at surviving.

Garrick (46:38.174) I think we're working things around us.

Noga Arikha (46:39.613) We are. We're very strange creatures.

Garrick (46:42.81) We're running out of time and we've had such a fantastic conversation. I love talking to you and I could do so for a very long time. So many questions. I want to ask you one last thing. If there's one thing to leave our listeners with, Noga, what would it be?

Noga Arikha (46:48.78) That was the term.

Noga Arikha (46:58.837) Well, apart from be curious.

Garrick (47:02.414) Yeah, apart from be curious.

Noga Arikha (47:03.756) But um, don't be afraid to feel.

Noga Arikha (47:09.752) And take time every day to just do just that. To be curious about your own feelings and to be curious about.

You know, how...

Noga Arikha (47:28.992) how everything you're doing, experiencing, how even the conversations we have, always infused with all these various levels of feeling and being that we're not always aware of them. And the beauty is coming into your awareness, I think, sometimes.

Garrick (47:41.983) Mm.

That's most wonderful. Don't be afraid to feel, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.

Noga Arikha (47:47.276) effort.

Thank you very much.

Garrick (47:53.546) This series is about how individuals and organisations use the power of curiosity to drive success in their lives, especially in the context of our new digital reality. It brings to life the latest understanding from neuroscience, anthropology, history, business, art and behaviourism, for example, about curiosity. It makes these useful for everyone.

Garrick (48:15.082) You've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're curious to hear from you. If you think there was something useful or valuable from this conversation, we encourage you to write a review for the podcast on your preferred channel, saying why this was so and what have you learned from it. We always appreciate hearing our listeners' thoughts and having a curious conversation. Join today, hashtag Curious Advantage. Curious Advantage book is available on Amazon worldwide.

Copy now to further explore the seven seas month for being more curious. Subscribe today and keep exploring curiously. See you next time.

Brilliant. What a pleasure.