Will to Win • episode "S1E3" • Human Instinct

45:38

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.

S1E4 • The Curious Mind • 2020 • 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

46:22

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?

S1E3 • The Curious Mind • 2020 • 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

23:40

The best-selling authors of Super Brain, Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Rudy Tanzi, describe the basic rules about how our brain functions. Your brain always eavesdrops on your thoughts. Can you teach your brain to become unlimited, by thinking that you have that potential?

10/10 • Curiosity Retreats: 2014 Lectures • 2014 • 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