All In The Mind

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 in conversation

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.

Bluebird is the ABC's new alternate reality (AR) game where you unfold the plot online. At its heart is a young scientist turned whistleblower, determined to stop a maverick entrepreneur's plan to geoengineer the global climate. But whistleblowing comes with huge psychological risks. An anthropologist and a sociologist offer a powerful perspective on how the self and psyche can be shredded in science.

They're vanguards of the virus - the first generation of HIV positive people to live long lives with the help of modern anti-retroviral drugs. The early days saw countless die too young, their brains ravaged by AIDS-related dementia. But now evidence suggests HIV prematurely ages the brain, despite the drugs.

Four wise souls consider the making of a wise mind. Does knowing more necessarily make you happier? Can ignorance be bliss? 'Lateral thinker' Edward de Bono, Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, and author and counsellor Petrea King join Natasha Mitchell at the Happiness & Its Causes conference.

Psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl treats people in the clinic whose lives are afflicted by severe psychosis. But he also documents an explosive 'other' history of schizophrenia, and what he sees as its transformation from a diagnosis of feminine docility or creative eccentricity, to one given to angry black men during the civil rights era. You'll never see medicine and the mind in quite the same light again.