Suicide • 2015 • The School of Life

4:58

Throughout the history of mankind, the subject of identity has sent poets to the blank page, philosophers to the agora and seekers to the oracles. These murky waters of abstract thinking are tricky to navigate, so it’s probably fitting that to demonstrate the complexity, the Greek historian Plutarch used the story of a ship.

TED-Ed • 2015 • Brain

220:54

(4 episodes merged) Jacob Ward sets out to discover we are not who we think we are. We imagine our conscious minds make most decisions, but in reality we go through much of our lives on "autopilot". Marketers and social media companies rely on it. Hacking Your Mind offers you an autopilot owner's manual.

2020 • Brain

48:04

Neuroscientist Emile Bruneau explores how we can use our capacity for critical thinking, our brain plasticity, and strategies like education and cooperation to help combat hate.

S1E6 • Why We Hate • 2019 • 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

57:40

Todd Sampson puts brain training to the test. A pioneer in the neuroplasticity revolution, Michael Merzenich, mentors Todd, showing him how to radically improve his cognition by turbocharging his thinking speed, attention and memory.

S1E1 • Redesign my brain • 2013 • 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