Conference Report: 'Rock/Body' at the University of Exeter

Rock/Body is an AHRC funded project bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences, health and earth sciences alongside artists to investigate mankind's relationship to geology. There have been a series of meetings, and our lab director Dr Luke Jones (me) was invited to attend the meeting dedicated to Time and Duration. 

The aim of the meeting was to explore the ways in which humans are able (or unable) to grasp geological or cosmological time frames; sometimes termed 'deep time' This is important for a variety of different preseasons, including policy making, for example being able to think about climate change evidence and plan accordingly or dealing with dwindling raw material resources, or planing for future advances in technology such as AI. It is also important for the communication of science, in terms of teaching about the formation of the universe, birth of stars, formation of planets, and to understand the processes of evolution.

There were talks and performances from a very wide range of people; geologists, writers, dancers, anthropologists, conceptual artists, museum directors, art directors, and from our lab a psychologist (Luke/me). You can read more about the meeting and the speakers here: Rock/Body

It was a pleasure to be invited to attend, these meetings where science and art are brought together are a really useful cross-platform for sharing ideas, and most importantly finding new questions and points of view. My talk was on the human perception of time, the processes by which it works and how these may be applied (or mis-applied) to the way people think about deep time.