 The Royal Society was the brainchild of some key intellects, great thinkers like Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren, the key architects of the inception of the Royal Society, but not only of the Society but some of the fundaments that we still appeal to when trying to understand who we are. A lot of the questions that people were interested in during the founding of the Royal Society, people are still fascinated by today. How can information come out of solid matter? And I think we're now equally puzzled by how consciousness of our own information, consciousness in the brain, can come out of this lump of jelly. We are who we think we are. There are certain perspectives on brain function that suggest that we are the author of our own environments. And if that is the case, then very much we will behave as we expect ourselves to behave. If one imagines the brain as a very large and complicated onion, on the outside we have the parts of the brain that are exposed to sensory input. But as you go deeper and deeper into the hierarchy, those deeper levels allow generating top-down predictions to be tested against beliefs in the outer layers. So a little baby will spend most of its first few months just working out what it can influence and move and what it can't move. Once you've done that, then you can select the data and the constituents of your own model. That's just a very technical way of saying we are curious beings. So this is the celebrated boils list written in the 1660s, and a wonderful list of aspirations at that time. So I can see the prologation of life, the restoring of youth, or at least some forms or marks of youth that's good enough. So like having new teeth or hair that's coloured as if you were young. That's very pragmatic. You're very nice. You don't actually have to be young, just look young. It's also quite prophetic. I mean, we've got here the cure of diseases at a distance. I mean, of course, that's exactly what we do with the radiotherapy nowadays. Non-invasive treatments for say cancer. Potent drugs to alter or exalt imagination, waking memory, procure innocent sleep. So nice. That's my favourite one. Of course, the most pertinent sort of work that we do. Of course, all the money that goes into farmer research, I think is a testament to the importance of that particular item on the wish list. This is marvellous. This is the inception of Bayesian thinking by the Reverend Mr Thomas Bays. He read November the 14th in 1763, laser foundation for the way that we analyse our data. How did that transform into an understanding of how the brain might be processing information? The notion was that we as scientists have hypotheses or beliefs about the causes of the data that we go and garner in order to try and test those hypotheses. And in exactly the same way, it could be that the brain is in the game of gathering sensory data to test its hypotheses or models about how the world works. What are the most fundamental aspects of the world in which we inhabit? The most obvious answer is the fact that I am me in a world that is also populated by other people like me. Usually there's a dry for a unified theory. That's why there's so much focus on the art of scientific writing. What did you have to believe in order for you to say or write that? And that will change my beliefs.