There are not many festivals where people queue around the block for a discussion about the nature of consciousness, but How the Light Gets In is one.

The event at Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath (October 1-2) has a bit of an academics' field day to it, but the great benefit of the format is that it takes people outside their areas of expertise.

And it's certainly not just for academics. The festival has great variety in subject matter - across science, politics and philosophy - as well as music food and comedy.

The Key to Consciousness, for which a snaking queue had formed (it goes down quickly when the audience is let into the tent), was hosted by Joanna Kavenna and featured neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow, philosopher Sam Coleman and, via video link, cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman.

The latter is working on developing a rigorous science in which conscious experience is the starting point, rather than a modelled external reality. It's not something you can comprehensively cover in an hour-long debate but it's a tantalising idea nonetheless.

The discussion itself was perhaps a little too wide ranging due, as Hannah Critchlow referenced, to the rather woolly term "consciousness".

Language also came under the spotlight in Does Your Sex Matter?, a fascinating IAI Academy session with Güneş Taylor.

The event was split in two, with Güneş, a genetics researcher at The Francis Crick Institute, first outlining the science behind the broad scientific categories of female and male.

The second half was more of a discussion on the relationship between sex and today's gender debates.

As could be applied in many contexts in this time of accelerating communication, the host notes: "How we talk and feel about this stuff has progressed far more rapidly than our language.”

Beyond the language, some of the ways we now communicate are inadequate for the debate (I'm looking at you, Twitter) and we need more (and more affordable) events like How the Light Gets In.