Rob Hopkins

They say you should never meet your heroes. They’re wrong. I recently had the huge honour of spending almost an hour in conversation with Robert MacFarlane, author of 9 books including ‘Mountains of the Mind’, ‘The Old Ways’, ‘Landmarks’ and, most recently, ‘The Lost Words’. I have admired Robert’s work for many years, in particular his reflections on imagination and his determination to keep aliv...

Today we're talking about technology and the fragmentation of attention with Maggie Jackson. After an early career as a foreign correspondent, Maggie returned to the US and began writing about workplace and worklife issues. She began noticing the impact of early technologies such as laptops and cellphones on people.  At that time, the tone of the national conversation was quite utopian and, Maggie...

I recently taught at Schumacher College, and spoke about the work I am doing about imagination.  Afterwards, a few students came up to me and said "you must speak to Vanessa Andreotti"!   She had, earlier that week, Skyped into the class, and presented her thinking about imagination, among other things.  So I tracked her down and got in touch, and we had the following fascinating conversation.  Va...

I went to the Soundart Radio SoundCamp's dawn chorus walk this morning (6th May 2018). Here's how the dawn chorus sounded.

David Sax is a journalist living in Toronto, Canada, and he is the author of the book The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. I found David’s book fascinating, with its suggestion that the current revival of vinyl, books, photographers using real film, physical notebooks, all speak to something deeper that is happening in the world around us. How, I wondered, does analog interact w...

A while ago I was reading a report about the psychological impacts of climate change, and came across the term ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’. It fascinated me. The author of the piece that discussed the idea was Lise van Susteren. Lise is a General and Forensic Psychiatrist in Washington D.C , and has been involved in climate change issues for the last 12 years or so. In 2005 she sought politica...

When I was recently at the #CTRLshift2018 conference in Wigan, one project that many people were talking about was Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn’s ‘The Bank Job’, currently underway in a former bank in Walthamstow. It had just been featured in The Guardian under the headline ‘The rebel bank, printing its own notes and buying back people's debts’, and was generating a real buzz. I was instantly sm...

This is a website about the power of “what if?”, and how, in a time of existential challenges, we might take “what if?” ideas and make them a reality. “What if we tackled climate change with imagination, courage and positivity?” is one such question that runs through all our blogs here. But I have been deeply impressed by the work of Daniel Raven Ellison and his efforts to try to get the city of L...

It was billed as “an emergency summit for change”, and it was a call that drew around 150 people from across the UK, and even some from further afield. Hosted at The Edge, a community-funded church building in the centre of Wigan just round the corner from the actual Wigan Pier (yes, that one, the one with the road famously leading to it), the event, exactly a year before Brexit becomes (or doesn’...

If you spend any time reading about the connection between education and the imagination, one name comes up repeatedly.  Kieran Egan has been writing about how to make education more imaginative since the 1980s, and has written many books on the subject.  Born in Ireland, he studied in London before moving to the US and then Canada where, as he puts it, “I got a job at Simon Fraser University in C...

While in Liege I visited Brasserie Coopérative Liégeoise, a co-operative brewery who make beers which source all their materials locally. Raphaël Lambois talked about the brewery and how it came about. Here is part of our conversation.

Pascal Hennen is the manager of Les Petits Producteurs, a fantastic shop opened in Liege as part of the Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise network of co-operatives. We caught up for a chat in the shop's back room. More about the shop at https://lespetitsproducteurs.be/

A conversation with Christian Jonet of Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise exploring the project's beginnings, evolution, and what it has led to. We were also trying to eat our supper at the same time, so you will need to excuse the restaurant noises in the background, and the occasional eating noises! Find out more at https://www.catl.be/.

Eric Holthaus was once called ‘The Rebel Nerd of Meteorology’ by Rolling Stone magazine and is a journalist who writes about climate change. In 2013, sitting at an airport, he burst into tears having just read the latest IPCC report, and took to Twitter to share the impact, as a scientist studying climate change, that this knowledge was having on him emotionally.

When looking through research into imagination, memory and the brain, one name that keeps appearing is that of Dan Schacter. We recently interviewed Donna Rose Addis on this podcast, and she and Dan often collaborate on research. Dan has been a Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department in Harvard University since 1991, focusing mainly on memory, and more recently on the relationship bet...

How does our relationship with digital technologies alter our relationship with the future, with the present, and with our imaginations? It’s a question we’ve reflected on in various podcasts and interviews in this series. One of the books that most influenced me on this was Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Present Shock’. Rushkoff is a writer, documentarian and lecturer, whose work focuses on human autonomy i...

If it is true that we are living through a time in which our collective imagination is increasingly devalued and undernourished, what might be the role of story in that, and how might story be part of the remedy?  There are few better people to discuss this with than Sarah Woods.  Sarah is a writer across all media and her work has been produced by many companies including the RSC, Hampstead and t...

I don’t know about you, but most of my time at school did very little to foster my imagination. It tended to be viewed as though I had brought a naughty, troublesome friend to school with me, one not afraid to point out the absurdity of most of what we did, and of how we did it. In today’s education system, with its pressures from league tables, test results and uninspiring curricula, the imaginat...

As the research stage of the book I am writing on imagination wraps up, it was a real treat recently to chat to Donna Rose Addis, a Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Auckland. One of the areas I’ve been researching, as a complete novice to neuroscience, has been what happens in our brains when we imagine. I had read several papers she had written about the similarities betwe...

Adam Gazzaley is a neuroscientist, a photographer, an entrepreneur, an inventor, and an author.  He is a Professor at University of California, San Francisco, where he directs a centre called Neuroscape which both creates new technologies and also validate them as tools. He has authored over 100 scientific articles, and is co-author, with Dr. Larry Rosen, of 'The Distracted Mind'.  We chatted by S...

One of the most fascinating craft breweries in the UK can be found nestled in a series of arches beneath a railway bridge in Bermondsey in London. For the last 9 years, The Kernel, under the guidance of its founder Evin O’Rourke, have pioneered not just amazing and distinctive beers, but also an approach rooted in connection to place, to a different way of doing business. http://www.thekernelbrewe...

John McCarthy on the captive imagination by Rob Hopkins

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk.  After completing his PhD in cell genetics in 1972, he has lived for 50 years in the Himalayas and studied with many of the great Tibetan masters, including Kangyur Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama.  He is a translator of Tibetan texts, an author of several books, and has done some long retreats.  He started Karuna-Sechen, which has helped mo...

Manish Jain is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse knowledge systems and cultural imaginations. He has served for the past 17 years as Coordinator and Co-Founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India and is co-founder of the Swaraj University, Creativity Adda, Learning Societies Unconference, Walkouts-Walkon network, and Ud...

Dr Larry Rosen is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at California State University. He has been a teacher for 45 years and has been studying the impact of technology for 33 years, and has written 7 books on the subject. He does a lot of research which explores the psychological impact of technology. He is co-author, with Adam Gazzaley of the brilliant ‘Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Te...