All In The Mind

Acclaimed actress Glenn Close, her sister Jessie and nephew Calen are star guests at this week's huge Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. Hear their candid account of a family history of mental illness, and why they're speaking out. Next week, in our Cultural Chemistry series...Our caffeinated culture, with YOUR stories!

Boy or girl? Blue brain or pink brain? Dr Cordelia Fine's new book, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, and Professor Rebecca Jordan-Young's latest, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference, have raked over research data and mined the controversies on how male and female brains differ -- no holds barred.

Why do we so often deceive ourselves, believe one thing and yet do another, and fail to exercise self control when we know better? Acclaimed evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban argues we need to be more forgiving of ourselves. Our strange ways are explained by our 'modular minds', one of the most hotly debated ideas about how your mind works.

Professor Peter Tyrer, editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, argues his profession practises 'mental colonialism' on people with long-term, chronic mental illness that's resistant to treatment. His approach is called Nidotherapy -- Nido meaning 'nest' -- focused on changing a person's environment not their personality. And, Jenny relates her poignant identity struggles and triumphs of being...

A peaceful view through a hospital window promotes healing after surgery, while other environments can make us sicker. Why? What is it about place and space that shapes your body and brain chemistry? Dr Esther Sternberg is a world leader in understanding the powerful interactions between your brain, emotions and immune system.

Half the living things on the planet are parasites, and they've developed uncanny ways of making us do what they want. A spooky encounter with suicidal crickets, mad rats and Zombie ants -- the parasites are here to take over our brain. One ecologist argues they could even be changing our personality at the civilisational scale.

'The sex of my body is female but the gender I feel is male.' A year in the making, this intimate portrait of a person on the cusp of transitioning to a man is not to be missed. Miles was born Megan, but after years of depression and confusion he made the enormous decision to reconcile body and mind... with an audio recorder at hand.

Two world renowned psychiatrists, Perminder Sachdev and Norman Doidge, join Natasha Mitchell on the All in the Mind couch, prepared to be asked anything. Are you normal? What is alien hand syndrome? The tics of Tourette syndrome -- what causes them? Do stories of broken brains generate little more than a cabinet of neurological curiosities?

Philosopher, poet and writer Dr Paul Fearne had his first psychotic episode as a young university student, and continues to take medication. 'To live is to take a leap into a sea of daggers, each one stabbing the fabric of your being', he wrote in his diary at the time, now published as a rare glimpse inside psychosis. From Freud to Wittgenstein, his experience inspired a unique PhD investigation...

LA comedian CJ Jones is a master storyteller in sign language. San Diego scientist Stephen McCullough studies the neurobiology of sign language. Both are deaf. Sign language is revealing surprising insights into the evolution of all human languages in the brain. From finding the word on the 'tip of the finger' to the bilingual brains of speakers and signers -- join two performers and two scientist...

Climate change is on and off the political agenda in Australia. Whether an emissions trading system or a carbon tax win the day, one big barrier stands in the way of change: human nature. How we think about the problem can trump what we actually do -- right down to shorter showers and turning off the lights. Leading environmental psychologists are now taking on the climate change challenge.

'Would you like fries with that?' America's big brands and fast food outlets have become the dominant signatures of globalisation. But is mental illness becoming another? Is West best when it comes to the diagnosis, definition and treatment of mental illness? Ethan Watters unearths a disturbing trend, which could inform how we respond to disasters like the devastating Pakistan floods.

Booker prize winning novelist AS Byatt has a thing for words. But do you know about her passion for science? In neuroscience she's discovered what she's always sensed about the workings of her own head as a writer -- and you must hear what's going on in her unique mind! She joins Natasha to discuss snail brains, mirror neurons and more for National Science Week.

We can't escape our cultural heritage, and yet it's more malleable than you might think. It's there in everything we do and say -- from the boardroom tables of big business to conversations with your GP. How are scientists getting inside our cultural mindsets to study them? Brain scans have entered the fray.

As East and West meet across the boardroom tables of big business, there's growing interest in how culture shapes the psyche and Self. If you're born into a collectivist or individualistic society, do you think differently? This week, controversial research on self-esteem. Do East Asians need less of it to feel good about themselves?

As old as the state of Queensland itself, Goodna Mental Hospital became Australia's largest asylum, housing 50,000 people over its lifetime. During a time of major institutional and cultural upheaval, the Office of the Patient's Friend opened its doors in 1977, the first patient advocacy service to operate within the confines of an Australian psychiatric hospital. Part advocate, part whistle-blowe...

As old as the state of Queensland itself, Goodna Mental Hospital became Australia's largest asylum, housing 50,000 people over its lifetime. In this series All in the Mind unearths stories from people who lived and worked there. A nurse reflects on life in the asylum during World War II before the dramatic arrival of modern medications, and two sisters reminisce on growing up at Goodna with their...

As old as the state of Queensland itself, Goodna Mental Hospital became Australia's largest and oldest asylum, housing 50,000 people over its lifetime. In this series, All in the Mind shares stories from people who lived and worked there. From a nurse who worked there from the 1940s - to a woman incarcerated as a young ward of the state, now fighting for justice. Warts and all recollections of mad...

Many scientists distrust the traditional lie detectors, like the polygraph with its wires and electrodes stuck to the skin, and say they never reliably reveal a liar. But now companies are marketing voice stress analysers and even brain scanners to do 'truth verification'. BBC science journalist Roland Pease investigates whether the new technologies are any better than the old ones. For copyright...

Science journalist Roland Pease investigates the eternal quest for an objective approach to spotting deception. For almost 100 years, law enforcement agencies have used the polygraph to find out whether suspects are lying or not. But is it a legitimate tool? For copyright reasons, this week's podcast and online edition is an alternative from our archives, When Good People Turn Bad: Philip Zimbardo...

Afflicted with amnesia after brain surgery, he became a man who lived in the perpetual present, and the most famous patient of 20th century neuroscience. Join Natasha Mitchell for a powerful posthumous encounter with HM's legacy and his brain, which continues to offer remarkable insights into the machinations of human memory.

Eminent psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist offers an ambitious, provocative thesis about how the brain's two hemispheres came to be, and construct the world. Today there's a power struggle being played out between the left and right brain that he argues is reshaping Western civilisation in disturbing ways.

Join George Prochnick as he escapes the racket of New York City on a profound quest for the quiet. His book, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, encounters the deaf architecture movement, surprises in the stillness of a Trappist monastery, and the Self unmasked by silence. Corinne Podger reports.

The soundtrack to our lives seems to have got louder. Surviving the cacophony of city existence is hard enough, but what does all that racket do to the developing brain as it learns? Enter the Virtual Classroom to discover some unexpected lessons for contemporary schools. And next week, we're in pursuit of silence. Corinne Podger reports.

Is neuroscience the new philosophy? Danish science writer and neurobiologist Lone Frank thinks the radical self-knowledge it offers us will help us transcend human nature. From the stage of the Sydney Writers' Festival, she dons The God Helmet, encounters her chemical self, and hesitates before having a brain scan.