search by

Bryan Appleyard hosts

Most viewed event

Alchemy, Anarchy, and Science

Rachel Armstrong, Steve Fuller, Susan Greenfield. Bryan Appleyard hosts.

Science is perhaps the defining triumph of the modern world. Yet it is increasingly under attack both from those who fear its consequences and those who question its claims to unique authority. Is there any real alternative or are we just seeing the return of myth and superstition?

Human and Superhuman

Is the pursuit of eternal youth fair on the young?

Speakers: Aubrey de Grey, Mary Warnock, John Harris, Athene Donald

Human and Superhuman

Scientists now claim a brave new world of designer humans is on our doorstep. I...

Speakers: Aubrey de Grey, Athene Donald, John Harris, Mary Warnock

Biography

Award-winning feature writer Bryan Appleyard is the author How To Live Forever Or Die Trying and The Brain is Wider than the Sky.

BIOGRAPHY

Bryan Appleyard was born in 1951 in Manchester. He graduated with a degree in English at King’s College, Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, he became Financial News Editor and Deputy Arts Editor at The Times, following which he became a freelance journalist and writer. He is currently a reviewer, commentator and columnist for a variety of newspapers, including The Sunday Times, New Statesman, Vanity Fair and Intelligent Life among others.

Appleyard’s writing style is famous for its straightforwardness and “unadorned transparency” (Clive James). Over the years he has become an acclaimed writer on science, bioethics, new technology and the arts. His reflections on the impact of fast-paced technological innovations on our society and lifestyle were recently crystallized in his book The Brain is Wider then the Sky.

Through his works, Bryan Appleyard highlights the importance of taking a moment to ask ourselves where we are going and what choices we can make to improve our lives. In that sense, his critique of the economic and political system focuses on the illusion that we have no choice vis-à-vis the deep transformations that our society is undergoing.

By using a combination of cultural analysis and investigation, Appleyard has written extensively on the impact of scientific progress and the industrial revolutions on our lifestyles and culture. Therefore, he has come to oppose the transformations of the human mind caused by the overabundance of new gadgets along with an excessive scientific analysis of our brains. His main point against science is that the faculty to break down things to an extreme, sub-molecular level doesn’t always help us defining or understanding the subject of study.

“Neuroscience is only beginning to grasp […] that the place where the mind ends and where the world begins in unknowable”

BOOKS