All In The Mind

Loneliness has been with Emily White for as long as she can remember. Smart, savvy, popular - none of this has inoculated her against 'the ghost in her life'. Her memoir is an encounter with the emerging, powerful science of loneliness, and a taboo like few.

The virtuoso violinist, star surgeon and super sportswoman - could any of us become the best of the best? Daniel Coyle toured the world's famous talent 'hotbeds' in search of secrets. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson says with enough 'deliberate practice' - 10,000 hours of it, he argues - anything's possible. But does that trump 'natural talent'?

High density living is great for the environment, right? But what does it do to our heads and hearts? The Australian psyche was moulded by the myth of the 'wide brown land', so what might life packed like sardines look and feel like? With the world's seven billionth person about to be born, can we learn from the Asian megacity experience? And will we still be sharing a cup of sugar with our neighbours? As the population debate gets mental, we're going in search of the soul in urban sprawl. A forum featuring Bernard Salt, Kim Dovey, Helen Killmier, and Sein-Way Tan, hosted by ABC Radio National's Natasha Mitchell at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.

Determined advocacy has put the mental health of young Australians front and centre on the public agenda. But child psychiatrist Professor Jon Jureidini is concerned. He's outspoken about the way his profession is interpreting and responding to young people's distress - distress, dis-ease or disease?

It started with two marshmallows back in the 1960s, and it became one of the most influential experiments in 21st century psychology. Walter Mischel on the role of willpower and the developing mind. Due to BBC copyright reasons the podcast and overseas edition is an archival feature instead, Proust was a Neuroscientist.

Natural born killer? If humans are born for survival, how hard is it to train us to kill for war, and what's the psychological impact of ending another person's life?

Putting the ego, id and subjective self back into the brain sciences, and vice versa. That's the ambitious quest of neuropsychoanalysis. Natasha Mitchell joins neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Dr Maggie Zellner in a very psychoanalytic sort of city, the Big Apple!

Japanese psychoanalyst Dr Naoto Kawabata is working with devastated communities evacuated after the Tohoku earthquake and nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture. Cardiff University's Understanding Risk team has studied people living adjacent to British nuclear plants, to explore how it shapes their identities. Probing the nuclear psyche.

'Follow your instincts' - it's that old adage we all hold true. Well, don't. Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues our ancestral minds are leading us astray in a 21st century world. From obesity to beauty, warfare to television, it's time to use our big brains better.

Nick says he's going to die if he doesn't lose weight. He knows he should eat less. He knows he should move more. How do our minds sabotage us, in concert with our bodies? A probing look at the psychology of obesity.