Dr. Eagleman takes viewers on an extraordinary journey that explores how the brain, locked in silence and darkness without direct access to the world, conjures up the rich and beautiful world we all take for granted. What is Reality? begins with the astonishing fact that this technicolour multi-sensory experience we are having is a convincing illusion conjured up for us by our brains. In the outside world there is no colour, no sound, no smell. These are all constructions of the brain. Instead, there is electromagnetic radiation, air compression waves, and aromatic molecules all of which are interpreted by the brain as colour, sound and smell. Cutting edge graphics show that data from the outside are rendered into electrochemical signals inside the brain, which map meaningfully onto physical reality. Our experience of reality is an electrochemical rendition of the world outside. Visual illusions are reminders that what's important to the brain is not being faithful to reality but ...

Episode two, What Makes Me?, explores the question of how the brain gives rise to our thoughts, emotions, our memories and personality. Philosophers and great thinkers have for millennia pondered the question of how physical stuff can give rise to mental processes. Last century, the new field of neuroscience joined the discussion, and Dr. David Eagleman explains that to a neuroscientist, the answers to such questions lie in a deep understanding of the brain. The process of becoming who you are begins at birth. The human brain starts life remarkably unfinished, which accounts for the fact that babies are completely dependent on adults, compared to many mammals that can walk, fly and swim soon after they are born. A baby has almost as many neurons or nerve cells as an adult brain but instead of being connected to each other, the great majority are unconnected. Wiring up begins immediately, and rapidly, as the child's brain starts to adapt to whatever environment - culture, habitat, ...

A scientific look into the control aspect of the brain/mind. Does free will exist? Are we entirely the products of our genes and our environment. Does our unconscious mind make most of our decisions? What does our conscious awareness do, what is it for? Take a deeper look at these questions and others, in a quest to better understand the human brain. Written by TheAnimalMother

The human brain is the most complex object we've discovered in the universe, and every day much of its neural circuitry is taken up with the tens of thousands of decisions we need to make. How Do I Decide? is a journey through the unseen world of decisions, and how they get made. We start with a simple one: choosing a flavour of frozen yoghurt, and learn that every decision we make is born of a winner takes all competition between rival neural networks. As David ponders the choice before him - mint verses lemon - inside his brain, two rival networks are fighting it out. As one begins to get the upper hand, it causes the other network to be less active, until a threshold is crossed, the decision is made: he goes for mint. Every decision we make is underpinned by this kind of neural conflict, and what's more, many of these important battles are won, and lost, without us being consciously aware of it. Professor Read Montague reveals that he can be 95% certain about which political ...

In Why Do I Need You? Dr. David Eagleman explores how the human brain relies on other brains to thrive and survive. This neural interdependence begins at birth. Dr. Eagleman invites a group of babies to a puppet show to showcase their ability to discern who is trustworthy, and who isn't. Brain scans reveal that when we see someone in pain, we feel it too. Circuits within the brain's pain matrix light up in both cases. And this is the basis of empathy. Our social brain draws us together into groups. In groups humans have accomplished great things - from football games to music festivals, from peopling the world to building great civilizations. But there's a darker side. For every in group there is always an out group. Dr. Eagleman's lab has shown that belonging to an in group means that at an unconscious level our brains care less about members of the out group. He journeys to modern day Bosnia to hear from an eyewitness about what happened in 1995 when genocide returned to ...

In Who Will We Be? Dr. Eagleman journeys into the future, and asks what's next for the human brain, and for our species. Mother nature has evolved a brain that is able to rewire itself according to its environment, which means that as technological advances continue apace, our technology is on a crash course with our biology. Dr. Eagleman describes ways in which we'll be able to plug new sensory inputs into our brains, to perceive more of physical reality than we currently do. For instance, although we now see in the visible spectrum new technologies could allow us to see in ultra violet or infra-red. Or we could have a totally new sense like the vibratory sense that Dr. Eagleman is himself working on. In addition, modern day brain-machine interfaces will one day allow us to enhance our physical bodies. The biggest game changer as a species would be if we discovered a way to upload our brains into digital space. Dr. Eagleman explores what it would take to do so. We would need ...