Suicide • 2015 • The School of Life

34:37

Would you reroute a train to run over one person to prevent it from running over five others? In the classic “Trolley Problem” survey, most people say they would. But I wanted to test what people would actually do in a real-life situation. In the world’s first realistic simulation of this controversial moral dilemma, unsuspecting subjects will be forced to make what they believe is a life-or-death decision.

S2E1 • Mind Field • 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

26:08

Reporter Dr. Graham Phillips examines the effects of meditation in his own life, and the medical evidence of how it affects those who practice it. Can meditation literally make your brain younger?

S1E1 • Catalyst: Season 2 • 2017 • Brain

117:37

Jim Al-Khalili goes on a journey through 600 million years of evolution to uncover how the human brain, the most complex structure known in the universe, came to exist. Chapter 1: With some 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion connections - more than all the stars in the Milky Way - the human brain is one of nature's greatest achievements. But how did something so incredibly sophisticated evolve from its simple beginnings? Chapter 2: Jim watches primates in action to see how they tackle survival challenges, revealing the clever tricks that shaped the brain's thinking. But the real breakthrough came when brains learned to be social. Teaming up with his wife, Jim investigates how relationships and friendships made people more intelligent. With AI getting smarter by the day, Jim wants to know what makes biological brains so special. Through scans, fossil discoveries and cutting-edge research, he uncovers what makes the brain so hard to emulate.

Horizon • 2025 • Brain

9:40

Consciousness is perhaps the biggest riddle in nature. In the first part of this three part video series, we explore the origins of consciousness and take a closer look on how unaware things became aware.

In a Nutshell • 2019 • Brain

24:59

So you say you love your computer or smartphone...but can it love you back? As we become more dependent on technology, and our technology becomes more lifelike, where does the line between human and computer lie? And what happens when our relationships become romantic? In this episode of Mind Field, I look into Artificial Intelligence.

S1E4 • Mind Field • 2017 • Brain