Help Me Adapt • 2015 • episode "S2E1" • Redesign my brain

54:04

The adult brain is the apotheosis of the human intellect, but what of emotion? The study of emotion was once relegated to the backwaters of neuroscience, a testament to the popular conception that what we feel exists outside our brains, acting only to intrude on normal thought. The science has changed: Emotion is now considered integral to our over-all mental health. In mapping our emotions, scientists have found that our emotional brain overlays our thinking brain: The two exist forever intertwined.

S1E4 • The Secret Life of the Brain • 2002 • Brain

118:15

Chris Packham helps autistic people illustrate how their minds work, helping them connect with their friends and family in a new, more authentic way. Chapter 1: Since sharing his own autism diagnosis with the world, naturalist and presenter Chris Packham has been flooded with letters and emails from other autistic people, frustrated that their friends, families and co-workers don't understand them. And in this series, Chris wants to bridge the gap. By teaming up with top film-makers, graphic designers, animators and musicians, Chris helps a group of autistic people create short films to reveal to their family and friends how they're truly feeling inside – what's really going on in their autistic minds. He helps an autistic comedian reveal to her mum what's really going on inside her head, gives a non-speaking autistic man the chance to take his message to the world and visits the only state school in the country exclusively for autistic girls. Chapter 2: Chris meets Anton, a teaching assistant and trance DJ with a deep love of Middlesbrough FC, and Ethan, a 19-year-old student and aspiring rapper from Essex. He helps them make films to reveal to their friends and classmates how Anton feels about change and Ethan about hypersensitivity to noise. Chris also meets Dr Luke Beardon, an expert in autistic hypersensitivity, and Dr Punit Shah, who helps him to understand both Anton's restrictive and repetitive behaviours and Chris's own need for order in his life.

2023 • Brain

58:16

In the final episode Dr Alice Roberts explores how our species, homo sapiens, developed our large brain; and asks why we are the only one of our kind left on the planet today?

S1E3 • Origins of Us • Brain

57:48

Todd puts brain training to the test in Make Me Creative, as he trains his brain to be more creative, innovative and to think more laterally, before attempting a creative art challenge.

S1E2 • Redesign my brain • 2013 • Brain

59:03

Comedian and impressionist Rory Bremner is on a personal mission to uncover the science of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), a condition which he has suspected he has. In this film, Rory learns about the science of ADHD, goes for a diagnosis and tries the drug methylphenidate (also known as Ritalin) for the first time - just before walking on stage. Around three per cent of the adult population suffer from ADHD (and five per cent of children), yet many people remain sceptical of its existence, blaming it on naughty children or bad parenting.

Horizon • 2017 • 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