National Senior Stretch 2026

Julie Arliss

Designed for highly able and curious students, this session invites you into the “twilight zone” where science, ideas and human experience meet. Exploring moments of agony and ecstasy, mystical experiences and claims of miracles, it challenges you to interrogate the limits of empirical methods and to think carefully about what counts as evidence and explanation — in other words, to step into some serious epistemology, without losing sight of real human experience. This is not a talk you simply sit through, but a conversation you actively take part in, questioning, testing ideas and learning how different disciplines frame the same questions in different ways. If you enjoy thinking deeply, asking difficult questions and exploring the edges of what we think we know, this session will stretch you and may even leave you seeing things differently.

Julie Arliss

This session is built around a deceptively simple Oxbridge-style question:
When, if ever, is it acceptable to break a rule?

At interview level, the interesting question is not what you think, but how you reached it. This session is a fast-paced thinking workout built around the kind of questions used in Oxbridge interviews. From friendship and promises to everyday rules — from Plato to parking fines — students are invited to test rules, probe exceptions, and discover how quickly sensible answers become awkward. Like an elastic band, rules will stretch a little before they snap, and this session explores how to tell the difference between reasonable flexibility and something about to recoil.The focus is on lateral thinking, conceptual clarity and intellectual flexibility — learning to notice when an argument has been stretched past usefulness. Lively, discussion-led and deliberately demanding, the session shows why the ability to think flexibly is often more impressive than simply knowing a lot.

Why does music move us so powerfully? Why does a single song awaken a memory thought long lost, or transform our mood in an instant? Philosophers since Plato have debated the place of music in human life. Is it mere entertainment, or something closer to a form of knowl edge, shaping the soul itself? This talk will ask: what does music reveal about who we are?

Drawing on research from evolutionary psychology, we will explore how music has helped our species survive, and how music has been used across history for healing and ritual. Neuroscience now reveals how music affects the brain — releasing dopa mine highs, reawakening memory in Alzheimer’s patients, and helping stroke survivors learn to speak again. From its effects on disorders of memory, mood and movement, we’ll look at what modern research tells us about the healing power of music today.

Learn what the research says about music in our everyday life – how the music we choose can sharpen our focus, soothe our stress, and improve our mental health. What does that say about the hidden connections between emotion, reason, and our shared ancestral human culture? Are we, in some sense, made for music? This session will invite you to reflect on music not merely as a soundtrack to our lives, but as a philosophical puzzle: a scientific marvel, a profound source of meaning, and one of the most powerful forms of healing we possess.

Julie Arliss

Designed for highly able and curious students, this session explores one of the most enduring and unsettling questions in human thought: whether our choices are genuinely free or shaped by forces beyond our control.

Drawing on ideas from neuroscience, genetics, psychology and the humanities, it introduces students to key ways of thinking about the problem, including physical determinism, genetic influence and compatibilist accounts of free will. Students are challenged to examine evidence, question assumptions and think carefully about what it would really mean to say that someone “could have done otherwise”.

This is a highly interactive session, with students actively debating, testing arguments and thinking alongside experts, as they explore what free will means for moral responsibility, punishment and how we understand ourselves.

Australia has made the first move on student social media use. Others may follow.

Is this leadership we should applaud—or a policy that misunderstands young people altogether? Students are invited to test serious ideas, challenge assumptions, and ask whether social media is best addressed through open education and trust, or through outright prohibition.

This debate is open-minded, intellectually rigorous, and unafraid of disagreement or inconvenient conclusions.