An in-depth voyage into the sci-fi film 'Alien' with the visionary filmmakers who created it. See how one of the most terrifying movies of all time came to life 40 years ago and the untold origin story behind Ridley Scott's movie. It was rooted in Greek and Egyptian mythologies and in our universal fears, and the history was inspired
by underground comics, the art of Francis Bacon, and the dark visions of Dan O'Bannon and H.R. Giger. The documentary is a contemplation on the symbiotic collaborative process of movie-making, the power of myth, and our collective unconscious.
Mind reading might sound like pseudoscientific, but its scientific counterpart, thought identification, is very much a real thing. It's based in neuroimaging and machine learning, and what's really cool is that experiments in mind reading aren't just about spying on what someone is thinking. They're about figuring out what thoughts are even made of. When you think of something, what does that mental picture actually look like? What resolution is it in? How high fidelity is a memory, and how do they change over time? In this episode, we are going to look at how
reading people's minds can help us answer these questions.
Why do we sleep? And what does sleep have to do with memory, trauma, and our emotions? From fruit flies to whales, virtually every animal sleeps. But why? Why do we need to spend nearly a third of our lives in such a defenseless state? Scientists are peering more deeply into the sleeping brain than ever before, discovering just how powerful sleep can be, playing a role in everything from memory retention and emotional regulation to removing waste from our brains. So why are we getting so little of it?
In the summer of 1983, just days before the birth of his first son, writer and theologian John Hull went blind. In order to make sense of the upheaval in his life, he began keeping a diary on audiocassette. Upon their publication in 1990, Oliver Sacks described the work as 'the most extraordinary, precise, deep and beautiful account of blindness I have ever read. It is to my mind a masterpiece.' With exclusive access to these original recordings, Notes On Blindness encompasses dreams, memory and imaginative life, excavating the interior world of blindness.
Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets kept by a family of storytellers. She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions. As each relates their version of the family mythology, present-day recollections shift into nostalgia-tinged glimpses of their mother, who departed too soon, leaving a trail of unanswered questions. Polley unravels the paradoxes to reveal the essence of family: always complicated, warmly messy and fiercely loving. Stories We Tell explores the elusive nature of truth and memory, but at its core is a deeply personal film about how our narratives shape and define us as individuals and families.
What if you could combat aging and discover the full potential of the human body? Global movie star Chris Hemsworth, despite being in peak superhero-condition, is on a personal mission to learn how to stay young, healthy, strong, and resilient. Undergoing a series of epic trials and extraordinary challenges in order to understand the limits of the human body, he'll learn firsthand how we can live better for longer by discovering ways to regenerate damage, maximize strength, build resilience, supercharge memory and confront mortality. Ever since his teenage years, stress has been part of Chris’s life, and he wants to learn how to deal with it better. Psychologist Modupe Akinola challenges him to stay calm during a terrifying walk along a crane that’s projecting out from the roof of a skyscraper. Modupe will train Chris in powerful physical and psychological techniques we can use to control the stress in our lives and combat the risk it poses to long-term health.
It was rooted in Greek and Egyptian mythologies and in our universal fears, and the history was inspired by underground comics, the art of Francis Bacon, and the dark visions of Dan O'Bannon and H.R. Giger. The documentary is a contemplation on the symbiotic collaborative process of movie-making, the power of myth, and our collective unconscious.