Salon encourages all kinds of things out of the shadows; usually a fabulous audience and the best speakers, experts and artists money can't buy.

For our November Salon which falls on the auspicious Toussaint Day, we present ‘Out of the Shadows’, a night dedicated to tempting out in to the light both our brighter and darker selves. We will be exploring the effects of looking on the bright side of life with neuroscientist and author of ‘The Optimism Bias’ Tali Sharot. Her research revealed just how hard wired we are for hope, and Tali will be answering some pretty taxing questions about our optimistic nature, why we mentally process lead in to gold, what happens when optimism fails, the value of anticipation, the cost of dread and also shedding some light on the question we’ve long wanted to know at Salon, what about animals, are they optimistic or what?

And for your darker selves, we have journalist and philosopher Robert Rowland Smith to explain ‘Endarkenment’, developed as a reflexive counter position to ‘Enlightenment’. His is a fascinating theory which reminds us we humans don’t necessarily match our devices in terms of rationality. In fact as technology bounds along a path of logical decision making at the speed of Moore’s law, history reminds us that our nature is not purely reasonable and perhaps its time we abandon a purely rational approach, to dig deeper, dig darker.

Finally we are delighted to be working with founder of Art Macabre, Nikki Shaill, who taking inspiration equally from Coolio and the Day of the Dead for her ‘Out of the Shadows’ session will be creating a living canvas for us for us to mainline in to our artistic selves, and pen in hand consider anew both light and shade. Using a barely dressed model, props and music Art Macabre will invite us to look in to the shadows and get our optimistic (or pessimistic) bias down on to paper.