Music can lift our spirits, bring us to tears, spark our creativity, pace our workouts. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin explores all these benefits of music – and adds the recent scientific evidence that in some chronic medical conditions, music is medicinal.

Alan and Clear and Vivid’s executive producer Graham Chedd chat about and play clips from some of the shows coming up in season 28. A major theme of the season is language –from babies picking up clues about  their mother’s language while still in the womb, to male fruit flies singing courtship songs to female fruit flies, to a best-selling novelist second guessing some of the language she used in her best known novel. 

Offsprings of the Earth – Earthlings – we are most of us ignorant of the 3.5 billion years of experiments our planet has been through to produce us. Yet the story is there in the rocks all around us – if only we can decipher what they have to say.

So much of our communication is spontaneous and yet we never really learn or are taught how to do it well – we’re just expected to do it. How to avoid being tongue-tied, whether when called upon to give an impromptu speech or when sitting next to a stranger at a dinner party.

Eliciting the story behind a patient’s visit to the hospital can lead to better diagnosis and treatment than medical tests alone – and also reveals much of what needs fixing in health care today.

Alan’s fleeting thought while chasing a spider around the floor sparked a conversation with an animal minds expert who argues that many more creatures than we imagine are conscious. What could this mean for our relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom – including those that annoy us and those we eat?

Good analogies led to cheaper cars and Apple computers; bad ones to lives wasted and lost. And while puns might not always make you smile (or grimace), they helped pave the way for written language.

As a Black graduate student disillusioned with academia, she founded Minorities in Shark Science (MISS). She now pursues her passion for sharks and outreach to a public fearful of sharks as a successful independent researcher.

For most of us who live in the “tame” modern world, a reminder of how we can refresh ourselves by experiencing the wild world – even the wild world of our backyard or city streets.

His research figuring out how our brains make moral judgments has led to two on-line games: One aimed at overcoming political animosity (and that’s fun to play!); the other to satisfy both your head and your heart when you donate to charity.