Suicide • 2015 The School of Life

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Suicide is a very rare phenomenon at the far end of human anguish. And yet its existence tells us something crucial about how fragile we all are: it's a further reminder of the need for compassion.

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The School of Life • 2014 - 2016 • 12 episodes •

How to Make a Country Rich

If you were setting out to make a country rich, what kind of mindsets and ideas would be most likely to achieve your goals? We invent a country, Richland, and try to imagine the psychology of its inhabitants.

2015 • Economics

Why Some Countries Are Poor and Others Rich

The reason why some countries are rich and others poor depends on many things, including the quality of their institutions, the culture they have, the natural resources they find and what latitude they're on.

2014 • Economics

How to Get Divorced

The rules for how to doom a relationship are relatively easy to follow. Here are a selection that are guaranteed to blow up love.

2015 • Lifehack

Suicide

Suicide is a very rare phenomenon at the far end of human anguish. And yet its existence tells us something crucial about how fragile we all are: it's a further reminder of the need for compassion.

2015 • Brain

Why Religious Beliefs Aren't Just Silly

Nowadays, many atheists declare not just that god is dead but that anyone who believes in him must be stupid. This seems a little harsh – we prefer to think about where religious beliefs come from: the pained parts of ourselves.

2015 • Lifehack

Philosophy - Plato

Plato was one of the world's earliest and possibly greatest philosophers. He matters because of his devotion to making humanity more fulfilled.

2014 • People

Political Theory - Karl Marx

Karl Marx remains deeply important today not as the man who told us what to replace capitalism with, but as someone who brilliantly pointed out what was inhuman and alienating about it.

2014 • People

The Perfect Country

This is a thought experiment about what the perfect country might be like. It's not an idle daydream, it's a way of highlighting some of the problems with our own nations and a way of signalling what the true opportunities might be.

2016 • Lifehack

How to Find Fulfilling Work

The key to finding fulfilling work is to think a lot, analyse one's fears, understand the market, reflect on capitalism.

2015 • Lifehack

Why We Love to Blame Our Partners

It’s an odd quirk of relationships that, after a time, we tend to develop the sincere conviction that it is all always our partner’s fault.

2016 • Lifehack

How to Use Drugs

We’re still only at the dawn of learning how to use drugs properly – knowing what drugs we need and when we should take them. We look forward to a brighter future for drug use.

2016 • Health

Why We Love Disaster News

Why are we so captivated and fascinated by news stories about disasters? Is it ghoulish and voyeuristic? Not at all...

2015 • Lifehack

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The Greater Good

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.

S2E1Mind Field • 2017 • Brain

Speechless

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

Meditation Can It Change You

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?

S1E1Catalyst: Season 2 • 2017 • Brain

Secrets of the Brain

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

The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became Aware

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

Artificial Intelligence

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.

S1E4Mind Field • 2017 • Brain