Melvyn Bragg and guests marvel at our brains and discuss how at the end of a century of research we still understand so little about how they work.Developments in the understanding of the brain represent one of the major leaps forward in science in the 20th century, and the research is gathering pace and intensity. It’s a subject which captures the imagination, particularly the search for consciousness whatever that might be, and brings together some of the newest technology and the oldest belief systems. What a piece of work is the brain - a grain-of-sand-sized piece contains one hundred thousand neurons, two-million axons and one billion synapses which all talk to each other. How far we have got with our understanding of the brain and what can it tell us about ourselves and the world we live in?With Professor Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, Professor of Pharmacology, Oxford University and Professor of Physics at Gresham College; Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, Director of the Brain Perception Laboratory, University of California in San Diego and Professor at the Salk Institute.
Kultur & GesellschaftPolitikWirtschaftReligiösTalk
In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the history of ideas - including topics drawn from philosophy, science, history, religion and culture.
Folgen von In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
1099 Folgen
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Folge vom 24.12.1998Neuroscience in the 20th century
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Folge vom 17.12.1998The American CenturyMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss how legitimate it is to call the 20th century the American century. Just how benevolent has America’s impact on the world been? And how durable has American’s initial idealism proved to be? Have ideals of democracy and freedom been forged across the globe as a result of the American influence, or has American oppression made the bigger impact? Has America ignored its own inequalities whilst advocating democratic capitalism elsewhere? Can America still lay claim to the idealism which fired its founders, or has materialism, with its uncomfortable corollary deprivation, lain waste to those early ideals?With Harry Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times, now an American citizen and author of The American Century; John Lloyd, associate editor of The New Statesman and former Times correspondent in Moscow and East European Editor of the Financial Times.
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Folge vom 10.12.1998Cultural Rights in the 20th CenturyOn the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations in New York, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the current status of that original declaration. Is it possible for any sort of rights to be ‘universal’? What are the implications of the ideas enshrined in that declaration - has the emphasis changed - and if so what are such rights? New thinking in this area has focused on ‘cultural rights’ but do these work alongside human rights, or do they supplant them? Has the advent of globalisation had an impact on human rights, and if so, how? At the end of the 20th century, can we look back to any progress in this area, and, if we look forward, do we see the oncoming train, or the light at the end of the human rights tunnel? With Professor Homi Bhabha, Professor in English Literature and Art, Chicago University and Visiting Professor of the Humanities, University College, London; Profesor John Gray, Professor of European Thought, London School of Economics in January 1998.
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Folge vom 03.12.1998History's relevance in the 20th centuryMelvyn Bragg and guests discuss the study of history this century. One of the debates raging in the practice of history is between the history of facts versus the imagination - a debate raised again by so-called ‘faction’ - fiction based on documentary facts which is so much in our minds today from films and television. But in fact it is a debate which has been going on throughout the century within history. The 19th century historian Thomas Macaulay wrote that History is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and like other districts similarly situated it is ill-defined, ill-cultivated and ill-regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction and sometimes theory.Why is the study of history important? Is history relevant to us today? Are the truths likely to be yielded from history closer to those disclosed in great novels than the abstract general laws sought by social scientists? And what is the role of imagination in the writing of history? With Simon Schama, Old Dominion Professor of Humanities, Columbia University in New York and currently filming a 16-part series for BBC Television on the history of Britain; Lady Antonia Fraser historian, writer and author of biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell and Charles II.