All In The Mind

Top clinical psychologist and psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison took the world by storm with her book An Unquiet Mind. In it she revealed her own torrid experience of bipolar disorder, and a passionate life marred by mania and depression. She joins Natasha Mitchell in conversation to discuss her new memoir, Nothing Was the Same. Recounting two decades with her partner, leading schizophrenia researcher Richard Wyatt, who died in 2002, it's a story of deep love and deep loss. To her, grief and depression differ in profound ways.

Acclaimed neuroscientist Fred Gage is a serial trailblazer. Decades of dogma were overturned when his team confirmed the adult brain continues to make new brain cells. Incredibly, now scientists can even turn skin cells into brain cells with a chemical push! But, if their potential to treat brain diseases or damage is to be realised, transplanted cells need to be able to call your brain home. Stanford biologist James Weimann has a major advance.

Neuroscientist by day, novelist by night - David Eagleman has just written an extraordinary little novel about the afterlife. He's also a leading researcher in synesthesia, studying people who taste sounds, hear colours, and live in a remarkable world of sensory cross-talk. He joins Natasha Mitchell in conversation about life, death and the in-between.

News of the largest studies on the genetics of autism to date is out, paving the way for genetic risk testing in the future. And, Australian research suggests autistic behaviours can be detected as early as eight months. So should we be screening newborns for neurological disorders like autism? The ethical debate unfolds on All in the Mind.

Dreams feel meaningful—drawn from a mishmash of content from our waking lives. But it's a hot debate among scientists, who are yet to confirm why we sleep, let alone dream. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson's extraordinary experiments involve eavesdropping on the sleeping minds of rats. He proposes dreaming is central to how we remember and learn.

Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak is a dream worker. To him dreams are an ecosystem of imaginings—powerful bodily experiences populated by characters with their own intelligences. When you encounter the images of your dreaming mind do you find one Self, or many? And, next week, a leading neuroscientist probing the possible link between memory and dreaming.

Reading the minds of others can be darned hard. Are their intentions good, bad or indifferent? Whether we hold people accountable for their behaviour depends on the answer. Scientists probe questions like this through experiments. Philosophers traditionally appeal to intuition and argument. But now a young band of experimental philosophers are taking armchair philosophy to task, and digging for data.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell and leading scholars in a dialogue about science and the self. This week, founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace consider with him what it takes to flourish...really flourish...individually and collectively.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell and leading scholars in a dialogue about science, wellbeing and our moral minds. This week Harvard evolutionary biologist and author of Moral Minds, Marc Hauser, asks - does biology constrain our mind's potential and our moral capacity? Is there a place for moral outrage? Next week, founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace join the fray.

From the stage of the 2009 Mind and Its Potential conference, His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell in an extended conversation about the mind, science and much else. And, joining the dialogue over coming weeks is the founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, leading Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace