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The neuroscientist Anil Seth is a leading researcher into consciousness. In his book, Being You, he explores why we experience life in the first person. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how our perceptual experiences are less a reflection of an objective external reality, and more a kind of controlled hallucination. He argues that perception is a brain-based \u2018best guess\u2019 \u2013 including our core sense of self \u2013 designed by evolution to keep the body alive.

Tiffany Watt Smith is interested in how the individual self can feel swept up and subsumed in crowds, and the tension between \u2018feeling yourself\u2019 and \u2018losing yourself\u2019. This has taken on added significance during a pandemic when collective experience has become tinged with anxiety. As Director of the Centre of the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, she has also looked at how far being able to name an emotion makes it more real.

Emotional turmoil, from revenge to love, are writ large in Rigoletto \u2013 the season opener at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It\u2019s the first production by the company\u2019s Director, Oliver Mears, and the first new show since the opera house closed because of Covid-19. Mears sees Verdi\u2019s masterpiece as a modern morality play that pits power against innocence, in a pitiless world of decadence, corruption and decay.

Producer: Katy Hickman

(Photo: Gilda) Lisette Oropesa (c) ROH 2021. Rigoletto Studio Rehearsal. Photograph by Ellie Kurttz.)