There’s more to living consciously than meets the eye – an eye which has a window on the world the size of a 50p piece, and mechanisms which cause about four hours of blindness per day.

At this fascinating and accessible-to-all event of short talks and fun experiments - easily carried out at home with a pot of iced water, rubber hand, hammer, paintbrush and a pair of upside down glasses – lively and articulate experts and neuroscientists based at Sussex University’s Sackler Centre for Consciousness revealed that the more we know about the way the brain works, the less we know our own minds.

Questions such as, “Am I a figment of my own imagination?” and “Is pain real?” became less pontifical and more relevant.

It’s generally accepted now that memory, goals, beliefs and expectations play a leading role in how we live. We know our emotions have physiological, cognitive and behavioural layers which, if brought into our awareness, can be changed for our own good. However, research into the neural pathways underlying consciousness points more to our role as the brain’s unwilling accomplice than free agent. Startlingly, not only does the brain control our actions, we are only conscious after the event - which will surely come to impact matters of law and moral responsibility.

By contrast, when hypnotised, we don’t actually have less control than we ordinarily would, and the experience will fit our goals and values. Overall we don’t know what we can do with our own minds.