The Psychedelic Drug Trial • 2021

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

59:15

Horizon uncovers the truth about how you really make decisions. Every day you make thousands of decisions, big and small, and behind all them is a powerful battle in your mind, pitting intuition against logic. This conflict affects every aspect of your life - from what you eat to what you believe, and especially to how you spend your money. And it turns out that the intuitive part of your mind is a lot more powerful than you may realise.

Brain

4:02

Are we wholly responsible for our actions? We don’t choose our brains, our genetic inheritance, our circumstances, our milieu – so how much control do we really have over our lives? Philosopher Raoul Martinez argues that no one is truly blameworthy. Our most visionary scientists, psychologists and philosophers have agreed that we have far less free will than we think, and yet most of society’s systems are structured around the opposite principle – that we are all on a level playing field, and we all get what we deserve.

RSA Shorts • 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

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

10:20

Professor Shapiro shows us a range of objects that seem simple and unremarkable at first glance, but which on closer examination simply cannot be constructed in reality – or are not at all what they seem.

S1E7 • Illusions • 2017 • Brain