Hacking Your Mind • 2020

24:08

Growing evidence suggests that psychedelic drugs could treat brain injuries and psychological problems. But can we get past their controversial history?

S2E4 • History 101 • 2022 • Brain

88:39

Alzheimer's disease -- the most feared of all maladies, with no way to cure, stop or even slow its insidious progression. But now, after decades of perseverance in the lab, researchers are on the cusp of a scientific breakthrough that could be the first step toward making Alzheimer's itself a distant memory. In the gripping new documentary Turning Point, acclaimed filmmaker James Keach takes us inside the quest for the first medication that that could treat the underlying process of Alzheimer's disease, more than a century after Dr. Alois Alzheimer first described the brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and cognitive skills. Along the way, we meet the people behind these grand experiments, the scientists driven as much by personal conviction as professional innovation. And we discover why medical science is never easy, often unpredictable and potentially perilous.

2020 • Brain

48:23

A plush country house is fixed with surveillance cameras while a group of unwitting test subjects - former pupils of a UK school - are first exposed to youthful memories to test if it can improve their health. This episode looks at how we behave in groups and puts our notions of hierarchy to the test.

S1E3 • Meet the Humans • 2017 • Brain

58:04

How does the creative brain work? Nancy Andreasen, neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist, has spent her life studying the relationship between brain function, mental illnesses and the emergence and continuance of creativity.

S1E7 • Curiosity Retreats: 2015 Lectures • 2015 • Brain

49:16

A 200,000 year old jawbone tells the story of an elderly woman who was kept alive thanks to the kindness of her companions. From this first known example of human compassion to modern day heroes, the final programme in the Human Instinct series explores the most complex of instincts. The instinct to put others first.

S1E4 • Human Instinct • Brain

59:20

Imagine a world in which you can think but cannot speak. For many stroke survivors, like former football star Junior and landlord Barry, this nightmare is a reality. Inspired by the experience of his brother-in-law, filmmaker Richard Alwyn has made an intensely moving, personal film about language and its loss. Alwyn's brother-in-law, journalist Dennis Barker, had a stroke in 2011 which left him speaking a bizarre, fluent gibberish – just one manifestation of the condition ‘aphasia' in which people lose or have a severely impaired ability to use language. Speechless tells the powerful stories of two men who can no longer take language for granted. Much of the film is made on the Neuro Rehab Unit of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London's Queen Square. There, Alwyn meets 55 year old Barry who has been in hospital for 4 months since a stroke left him barely able to speak. Courageous and determined, Barry's personality constantly triumphs where his language fails. And two years after his stroke when just 35 years-old, former Premier League and international footballer Junior Agogo is still visiting the Unit as he battles to find his way in the world with depleted language. “I had thoughts but I'm saying, where was my voice? I was baffled, man.” Speechless raises questions that straddle philosophy and science. Can we understand the world if we don't have language to name and describe it? Can we think without language? How much is our identity wrapped up in language? These questions are at the heart of conversations that Alwyn has with clinicians and therapists working to get Barry and Junior back into the world. Speechless is fascinating and moving, upsetting and uplifting in its depiction of the isolating and estranging condition, aphasia.

2017 • Brain