Our brain is always making decisions - Nigel explores how it does this, and if we can help it to make better ones? Is it possible to change the brain we’re born with to a supercharged brain?
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For most of human history, our brains dealt with pretty straight forward problems. But that brain is the exact same one we now use to post pictures of our pets on social media, fill out Excel spreadsheets, and worry about the next payment on our credit card.
2020 • Brain
The traditional narrative is that humans are selfish. If pushed, the story goes, we look after ourselves first and others later. In this episode, we see how modern neuroscience has blown that myth apart.
2020 • Brain
Our brain is always making decisions - Nigel explores how it does this, and if we can help it to make better ones? Is it possible to change the brain we’re born with to a supercharged brain?
2020 • Brain
In the first episode, we explore the apparently very simple question: What is your brain? This is something humans have been struggling to understand for millennia and science for several decades.
2020 • Brain
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
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
International criminal lawyer Patricia Viseur Sellers investigates the role of perpetrators, from leaders to followers, as well as those who resist the power of hate.
S1E5 • Why We Hate • 2019 • Brain
If I could live forever, should I? How does being reminded of our own mortality affect us psychologically? In this episode I speak with mortician and death positivity activist Caitlin Doughty and visit a cryonics facility trying to extend human life indefinitely. Will I take them up on their offer, or will I choose to die?
S3E5 • Mind Field • 2018 • Brain
Why do we dream? When the lights go out, interesting things happen in the brain and body. What’s the significance of dreams, and what can they teach us?
S1E2 • The Mind, Explained • 2019 • Brain
Professor Shapiro reaches back into history to show that artists, architects and mathematicians have also employed visual “tricks” to baffle and entertain us by manipulating perspective and challenging our ideas of what is real and what is fake.