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Festivalgoers sometimes report feeling they have a fresh perspective of the world when they make their weary way home after a stimulating cultural gathering.
A new “festival of ideas” in Somerset is aiming to measure whether the beliefs and ideas of attenders and speakers really are changed by their event.
People attending the Big Brue in the town of Bruton next weekend will be asked to take part in tests before and after to try to discover if what they have listened to has made them more open, optimistic, empathetic and tolerant of people with views they do not agree with.
Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist and educator, said the idea was to turn the festival into an experiment
“We have set up a number of panels with strongly opposing views. We want to examine if the festival can change perception of conflict. Can conflict be generative rather than degenerative?”
Lotto said that finding out ways of understanding other people who see things in a different way was important given the febrile nature of much national and global debate.
“Because of the polarisation in the world, there’s so much pessimism and negativity, partly because views are incredibly non-nuanced. Which means it feels very fragile. It’s very extreme.”
Lotto did something similar at a Cirque du Soleil performance to test whether the wonder and awe people felt changed the way they interacted with other people.
One of the experiments there was for an interviewer to drop their pens and see how people responded both before and after watching Cirque du Soleil performers.
They found people were more likely to bend and pick up the pens afterwards. “People were much more pro-social than they were before. Much more willing to help than they were before.”
Big Brue festivalgoers will be asked to fill in questionnaires and carry out simple tasks such as finding the midpoint of a line.
Lotto said the line task could indicate which side of the brain the respondent was using – and might be different at the start and end of the festival, indicating a change. Panellists will also be invited to take part in the experiment.
An ethos of the Big Brue, taking place in the grounds of the Hauser & Wirth Somerset gallery, is that conflicting views can be a good thing if they are aired under conditions that encourage curiosity, compassion, creativity and learning.
So rather than bringing together speakers likely to have similar views, the festival has deliberately put together panels of people likely to have contrasting opinions.
Lotto said he expected a session on artificial intelligence involving the former UK chancellor George Osborne, who now works for OpenAI, and Misha Glenny, who has written about the global race for dominance of the technology, to be lively.
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Two sessions with the Reform UK MP Danny Kruger may also be sparky. In one, he will discuss migration, in another, called Family Matters, he will be in conversation with his mother, the cookery writer and broadcaster Prue Leith. Parent and child disagree over subjects such as assisted dying and abortion.
Even a literature session is being billed as a “poetry battle” in which the actor Dominic West and singer and activist Bob Geldof “go head-to-head to champion the poems they believe everyone else should love”.
The journalist and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, one of the festival founders and the host for the Kruger/Leith face-off, said: “The idea is not just to hold another talks festival. We’re creating a space where ideas are presented and tested, where disagreement is welcome so long as its agreeable, and audiences are participants as well as spectators.”
Festival organisers also hope the rural setting – away from the “fray of the city” may be a good location for working out how to “disagree agreeably” – the theme for the talks programme.
Another of the founders, the human rights lawyer Jason McCue said: “We firmly believe that progress comes from difference and disagreement, so we are here to stir things up and help make sense of the world.”
The Big Brue takes place on 19 and 20 September at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. For details: https://bigbrue.com/
