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Can you look inside the living brain and tell what someone is feeling? For the first time in history we have fMRI – a technology that promises to show the neurochemical traces of joy, rage, love and hate, as they cascade through the brain. Filmmaker Brent Hoff enlisted the Stanford Center for Cognitive Neurobiological Imaging to hold the world’s first ever ‘love competition’. Seven contestants had five minutes in an fMRI machine to love someone ‘as hard as they can’. The idea that love can be measured may seem deeply unromantic: the results were anything but.
Director: Brent Hoff
Producer: Malcolm Pullinger
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
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Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
7 minutes
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Life stages
What Michelangelo’s late-in-life works reveal about his genius – and his humanness
13 minutes
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Biography and memoir
Preserving memories of a Japanese internment camp, and the land where it stood
8 minutes
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Stories and literature
To capture grief in poetry is to describe the ineffable. Here’s why Tennyson did it best
8 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
The unique fellowship between teens and young puffins on a remote Icelandic island
20 minutes