Lisa Appignanesi is Visiting Professor in Literature and Medical Humanities at King's College London, where she holds a Wellcome Trust 'People' Award. A writer, novelist and cultural commentator, she is Chair of the Freud Museum, London, and former President of English PEN. One of the judges of the Orange Prize 2012, she has written ten novels, including The Memory Man, a fiction which sprang out of her time as a writer in residence at Professor Steven Rose's memory lab at the Open University. Her most recent non-fictions are All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (2011) and the prize-winning Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (2009) which also won the BMA Award for the Public Understanding of Science. She is the author, with John Forrester, of the classic study, Freud's Women; broadcasts regularly with BBC's Saturday Review, and was editor of Profile's 'Small Books on Big Ideas'.

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge. He is author of Mindblindness (1995), The Essential Difference (2003), Prenatal Testosterone in Mind (2005) and Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011). He has edited a number of scholarly anthologies, and has also written books for parents and teachers. He is author of the DVDs Mind Reading and The Transporters, to help children with autism learn emotion recognition. Both were nominated for BAFTA awards. His work has earned him many prizes. He is a Fellow of the BPS and the British Academy, co-editor in chief of the journal Molecular Autism, and Chair of the NICE Guideline Development Group for autism.

A.S. Byatt (DBE) is an internationally renowned novelist, short story writer, critic and former academic. Her novel, Possession won the Man Booker Prize in 1990, while The Children's Book was shortlisted in 2009. Her quartet of novels The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman evoke a mid 20th century history of Britain and, amongst much else, the clash between utopian ideas and human frailty. Both Possession and Angels and Insects have been made into films. Her scientific interests, her insights into childhood, development and human consciousness (as well as the force of the unconscious), are embedded throughout her writing. As a critic, she has written a study of Iris Murdoch, Degrees of Freedom; Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, as well as numerous essays and articles.

Imogen Cooper has a worldwide reputation as a pianist of virtuosity and poetic poise and as one of the finest interpreters of the classical repertoire. She has performed with the New York and the London Philharmonic, with Colin Davis and Simon Rattle, as well as a solo and chamber musician in recitals in all the major world capitals. As a Lieder recitalist, she collaborates with Wolfgang Holzmair, in what has been hailed as 'one of the greatest living partnerships in song'. For Philips Classics they have recorded Schubert's Schwanengesang, Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin, a selection of Lieder and songs by Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven. Her solo discography includes six CDs of the piano works of Schubert's last six years, for Ottavo recordings. A CD box set entitled “Imogen Cooper and Friends” encompassing solo, chamber and lieder works has been released by Philips. For Avie, she has recorded Mozart's Concerti Nos. 9 and 23, playing/directing the Northern Sinfonia.

Tim Crane has been Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge since 2009. Before this he taught at UCL for 19 years, and he founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London in 2005. He works on the philosophy of mind and psychology, and on metaphysics. He is the author of The Mechanical Mind (1995), Elements of Mind and the editor of The Contents of Experience (1992), History of the Mind-Body Problem (with Sarah Patterson, 2000) and, with Katalin Farkas, Metaphysics: a Guide and Anthology (2004). He has just completed a book on the representation of the non-existent, The Objects of Thought, and a collection of his papers, Aspects of Psychologism is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. He is the General Editor of the Routledge Encylopedia of Philosophy and the Philosophy Consultant Editor of the TLS.

Anthony David has been an honorary consultant at the Maudsley since 1990 and was awarded a personal chair from the Institute of Psychiatry and GKT School of Medicine in 1996. His research interests include schizophrenia, neuropsychiatry, medically unexplained syndromes and neuroimaging – both structural and functional. He is especially interested in the concept of insight in schizophrenia and how this relates to treatment compliance. A Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Academy of Medical Sciences, he is also a member of the Experimental Psychology Society and a founder member of both the British Neuropsychological Society and British Neuropsychiatry Association, of which he was Chair from 2004-7. He is an associate director of the UK Mental Health Research Network and lead for Industry collaboration. He is editor of the journal “Cognitive Neuropsychiatry” and has published several books including The Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (1994) with J Cutting, Disorders of Brain and Mind (1998) with M Ron, The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry (2003) with T Kircher, and Insight and Psychosis (2nd Ed) (2004) with X Amador and Lishman's Organic Psychiatry (2009). He is author of over 450 publications in peer reviewed medical and scientific journals.

Declan Donnellan is joint Artistic Director of Cheek by Jowl with Nick Ormerod. Since 1981 he has directed over 30 productions for the company which have toured across the globe. As Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre in London his productions include Fuenteovenjuna, Sweeney Todd, The Mandate and both parts of Angels in America by Tony Kushner. He has staged Le Cid for the Avignon Festival, Falstaff at Salzburg with Bryn Terfel, Romeo and Juliet, with the Bolshoi Ballet and Andromaque at Peter Brooke's Bouffes Du Nord. In 2000 he formed a permanent company of actors in Moscow, under the auspices of The Chekhov International Theatre Festival. The ensemble's productions so far include Boris Godunov, Twelfth Night, Three Sisters, and The Tempest. These productions have already been seen in 48 cities around the world and all continue to tour internationally in repertoire.He has written versions of plays by De Musset, Sophocles, Erdman and Lermontov. His first feature film, Bel-Ami, co-directed with Nick Ormerod, was released in 2012. His book, The Actor and the Target, originally published in Russian (2001), has been translated into over a dozen languages including, last year, a version in Mandarin.

Lara Feigel is a lecturer in English and the Medical Humanities at King's College London. She is the author of Literature, Cinema, Politics, 1930-1945 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and of the forthcoming The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013). She is the editor (with Alexandra Harris) of Modernism on Sea (Peter Lang, 2009) and (with John Sutherland) of The New Selected Journals of Steven Spender (Faber, 2012).

Chris Frith is Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London (UCL) and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Since completing his PhD in 1969 he has been funded by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust to study the relationship between the mind and the brain. He is a pioneer in the application of brain imaging to the study of mental processes. He has contributed more than 400 papers to scientific journals and is known especially for his work on agency, social cognition, and understanding the minds of people with mental disorders such as schizophrenia. For this work he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008.

He was Niels Bohr Visiting Professor in the Interacting Minds project at Aarhus University in Denmark from 2007-11 and maintains his connection with the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus. He has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Salzburg and the University of York. He has published several books, including, (with Eve Johnstone) Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction (2003), and (edited with Daniel Wolpert) The Neuroscience of Social Interaction: Decoding, Imitating and Influencing the Actions of Others (2004). His last book, Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World (Wiley-Blackwell 2007), was long-listed for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, 2008 and received the 2008 Book Award from the British Psychological Society. In 2009 he was awarded the Strömgren medal for work on Schizophrenia, the European Latsis Prize (Jointly with U Frith) for work on 'Human mind, Human brain' and the International Prize from the Fyssen Foundation for work on Neuropsychology

Patrick Haggard is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, where he leads an interdisciplinary research group of 16 postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. His interests focus on the control of voluntary action, and on the awareness of one's own body. He has published over two hundred original papers on subjects ranging from free will to the experience of pain. He is the editor of Mental Processes in the Human Brain(2008), and Sensorimotor Foundations of Higher Cognition(2007). He holds a Professorial Fellowship from the Economic and Social Science Research Council, and has previously held research fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society.

Francesca Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and, from October 2012, Director of the MRC SGDP Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, KCL. Her research focuses on autism spectrum conditions. She has explored the nature of social understanding in typical development, and 'mind-reading' impairments in autism. She is also actively engaged in studies of abilities and assets in people with autism, and their relation to detail-focused perceptual and cognitive style. As well as cognitive methods, her research involves functional imaging studies, exploration of acquired brain lesions, and behaviour genetic methods. She is the author of numerous research papers, and a book on autism for general readers. She won the Telegraph's Young Science Writer Award, and was the subject of a Channel 4 programme for schools. She has received the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal, the Experimental Psychology Society Prize and, this year, the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award. From 2013 she will be the President of the International Society for Autism Research.

Melissa Hines is Professor of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, where she directs the Hormones and Behaviour Research Laboratory. She also is a Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. She is past president of the International Academy of Sex Research, and is the author of the book, Brain Gender (Oxford University Press), as well as of over 100 scientific articles. Her research interest is in the development of gender-related behaviour. One focus of her interest is on gender identity development in individuals born with ambiguous (male/female) external genitalia, caused, for instance, by genetic conditions that alter fetal testosterone production. She also is interested in how inborn predispositions to gender typicality, or atypicality, particularly those caused by fetal testosterone exposure, act together with postnatal experience to shape gender development.

Peter Hobson is Tavistock Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the University of London, based at the Tavistock Clinic and in the Behavioural and Brain Sciences Unit, Institute of Child Health, UCL.  He is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge.  His research interests converge upon the significance of interpersonal relations for understanding the course of human development, both typical and atypical, and include programmatic studies of autism and borderline personality disorder. He is the author of the influential The Cradle of Thought (2002)

Michael Kopelman is Professor of Neuropsychiatry at King's College London (Institute of Psychiatry), and runs a Neuropsychiatry and Memory Disorders Clinic at St Thomas's Hospital. He has been co-editor/co-author of The Handbook of Memory Disorders, 2002; Lishman's Organic Psychiatry, 2009; and Forensic Neuropsychology in Practice, 2009. He is past-President of the British Neuropsychological Society, and currently President of the International Neuropsychiatric Association and the British Academy of Forensic Sciences. His clinical and research interests include the nature of retrograde amnesia, confabulation, and psychogenic amnesia.

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a founder member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is President of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK and Visiting Professor at the School of Human and Life Sciences, Roehampton University. He is the author of several widely acclaimed books including: Introducing Lacan; Why do women write more letters than they post?; Freud's Footnotes; Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing; Why do people get ill? (with David Corfield); The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, and What is Madness?. Darian Leader is a member of the Trustees of the Freud Museum London.

Kathy Lette first achieved success de scandale as a teenager with the novel Puberty Blues, which was made into a major film and a TV mini-series. After several years as a newspaper columnist and television sitcom writer in Los Angeles and New York, she wrote ten international bestsellers including Mad Cows (the film starred Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel), How to Kill Your Husband and Other Handy Household Hints (recently staged by the Victorian Opera), To Love, Honour and Betray and The Boy Who Fell To Earth. Her novels have been published in fourteen languages. Kathy appears regularly as a guest on the BBC and CNN News. She is an ambassador for Women and Children First, Plan International and the White Ribbon Alliance. In 2004 she was the London Savoy Hotel's Writer in Residence where a cocktail named after her can still be ordered. Kathy is an autodidact (a word she taught herself) but in 2010, received an honorary doctorate from Southampton Solent University.

Simon McBurney, the founder of the internationally renowned Theatre de Complicité is widely credited with having revolutionized the face of British theatre with productions such as Durrenmatt's The Visit (1989, The Street of Crocodiles (1992)inspired by the writings of Bruno Schulz, The Three Lives of Lucy Cabrol (!994) based on a novella by John Berger, and Mnemonic, his play about memory and the ice man. McBurney brought a new conception of authorship, physicality and the visual to the British stage. This powerful fusion of storytelling , visual elements and ideas is also evident in more recent productions such as The Elephant Vanishes (2003) and A Disappearing Number (2009) about the Indian mathematical genius, Ramanujan and the Cambridge don, G.H. Hardy. He has appeared on screen in a wide variety of rolls, including Oliver Lacon in Tinker Tailor.

Ian Bostridge, Ian Bostridge's international recital career has taken him to the Salzburg, Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna, Aldeburgh and Schwarzenberg Schubertiade Festivals and to the main stages of Carnegie Hall and La Scala, Milan. He has held artistic residencies at the Vienna Konzerthaus and Schwarzenberg Schubertiade (2003/2004), a Carte-Blanche series with Thomas Quasthoff at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw (2004/2005), a Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall (2005/2006), the Barbican, London (2008), the Luxembourg Philharmonie (2010/2011), the Wigmore Hall (2011/12) and Hamburg Laeiszhalle (2012/2013).
His operatic appearances have included Lysander ('A Midsummer Night's Dream') for Opera Australia at the Edinburgh Festival, Tamino and Jupiter ('Semele') for English National Opera and Quint ('The Turn of the Screw'), Don Ottavio and Caliban (Adès's 'The Tempest') for the Royal Opera. For the Bavarian State Opera he has sung Nerone ('L'Incoronazione di Poppea'), Tom Rakewell ('The Rake's Progress') and Male Chorus ('The Rape of Lucretia') and Don Ottavio for the Vienna State Opera. He sang Aschenbach ('Death in Venice') for English National Opera, also seen at the Monnaie, Brussels and in Luxembourg. Ian Bostridge's recordings have won all the major international record prizes and been nominated for 12 Grammys.

David Papineau was educated in Trinidad, England, and South Africa. He has a BSc in mathematics from the University of Natal and a BA and PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University. He has lectured at Reading University, Macquarie University, Birkbeck College London, and Cambridge University. Since 1990 he has been Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. He was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science for 1993-5 and President of the Mind Association for 2009-10. In 2000 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow and in 2007 a Mind Fellow. In 2010 he delivered the Rudolf Carnap Lectures in Bochum, Germany and in 2011 the Gottlob Frege Lectures in Tartu, Estonia. He works mainly in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and metaphysics, but has interests in many areas of philosophy and beyond. Among his books are Theory and Meaning 1979, Philosophical Naturalism 1993, Thinking about Consciousness 2002 and Philosophical Devices 2012.

Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly-acclaimed novels, including the recent Ignorance, The Looking Glass, and Daughters of the House, which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, she has also published poetry and short stories, the latter collected in Mud: Stories of Sex and Love. Her memoir, Paper Houses was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Amongst much else, she is interested in truth and lies and the construction of gender. She was a presenter of BBC Radio 3 Night Waves.

Steven Rose is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the Open University . He was appointed Professor and Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research Group at the Open University at the age of 30 in 1969, following a degree in biochemistry at Cambridge, a PhD in neurochemistry in London and post doc periods in Oxford Rome and London. His research centred on the neurobiology of learning and memory concerning which he has published more than 300 papers and reviews and which most recently focussed on developing a therapy for Alzheimer's Disease. Throughout his career he has also been actively concerned with the ethical legal and social aspects of developments in science, especially genetics and neuroscience, He has received a variety of medals and international awards. He has written or edited 15 books including The Making of Memory (science book prize 1993, new edition 2003), Lifelines and Alas Poor Darwin (with feminist sociologist Hilary Rose), and The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind. Hilary Rose's and his new book Genes, Cells and Brains: Bioscience's Promethean Promises will be published by Verso in November. Steven Rose has been awarded a variety of medals and prizes, including the Biochemical Society's special medal for science communication. He is well-known as a panel member of the BBC's The Moral Maze, and as a reviewer and essayist for national papers.

Sir Michael Rutter has been described as the 'father of child psychiatry'. He trained in internal medicine, neurology and pediatrics, worked at the London Institute of Psychiatry since 1958, became a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley in 1966 where a centre for Children and Adolescents is named for him. He founded the MRC's Child Psychiatry unit in 1984, and its Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre ten years later. His pioneering work on autism, depression, antisocial behaviour, and reading difficulties have led to over 40 books and some 400 scientific papers. Knighted in 1992, he was deputy chair of the Wellcome Trust from 1999-2004, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987, was a Founding Fellow of the Academica Europaea and the Academy of Medical Science. He is currently Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Insitute of Psychiatry at King's College, London.

Fiona Shaw is one of Britain's most acclaimed actors for stage and screen, as well as a talented director. Her range is vast, spanning Greek tragedy to broad comedy – from Electra, The Taming of the Shrew, Hedda Gabler, London Assurance to Harry Potter, where she appears as Petunia Dursley. Her famous collaborations with Deborah Warner include her starring in Richard 11, Brecht's Mother Courage and The Good Woman of Szechuan. Recently, she has added opera to her repertoire, directing Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro to great critical acclaim. In September 2012, she takes to the stage of the National Theatre once more in Howard Barker's Scenes from on Execution.

Mark Solms is a psychoanalyst and a lecturer in neurosurgery at St Barolomew's and Royal London School of Medecine, as well as chair of neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town. He has long sought to relate the clinical findings of psychoanalysis with research generated by the neurosciences, a project which harks back to Freud's own aspirations as a neurologist. Solms's book with Mark Turnbull The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (2002) lays out this terrain in an accessible manner.

Neil Vickers is Reader in English Literature and the Medical Humanities at King's College London. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004) which examines Coleridge's participation in the medical culture of his time. He has published widely on the history of psychology and British psychoanalysis. Before moving into academic life, he had a career in epidemiology and public health. He is currently writing a book on autobiographical narratives of illness.

Timberlake Wertenbaker is the award winning author of some twenty plays including Our Country's Good, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, The Love of the Nightingale, Galileo's Daughter and After Darwin. Many of her plays have been for the Royal Court and the RSC. Her translations and adaptations include several plays by Marivaux, Sophocles' Theban Plays and most recently a critically acclaimed production of Racine's Brittanicus at Wilton's Music Hall. The Love of the Nightingale was made into an opera. Her Screenplays include , The Children adapted from Edith Wharton and Do Not Disturb (BBC2). She has also adapted A.S. Byatt's Possession for BBC Radio 4 and a fifteen minute play The Memory of Gold to be broadcast on October 16 on Radio 3. She is currently UNESCO Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Film Director and Producer

Poppy Sebag-Montefiore is a filmmaker, writer and journalist. She's currently cutting an independent film following historian Theodore Zeldin's quest to add human and emotional value to corporate, consumer life, during his 4 month residency inside an IKEA store. She makes investigative films for BBC's Newsnight and works for BBC World Service's Newshour. She is Journalist in Residence at Kingston University's Writing School, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Raphael Samuel History Centre, and an editor of the History Workshop Journal. She is the author of a children's book on China where she lived and worked for 5 years. Poppy is a founder of Never Again, a conflict prevention network, based in Rwanda.