There are thousands of academic papers about depression. There are, in comparison, virtually none about laughter. We’ve been talking to a leading expert on laughter – who argues that we should take it more seriously. Picture Credit: Tim Robberts/Getty ..read more

Some countries, like Norway, are rich. Other countries, like Niger, are poor. Why? Why do some countries succeed whilst others fail? There are various possible theories. Some say that certain countries have geographical or resource advantages. Others claim that the real explanation is cultural – in some cultures, it’s said, there’s a stronger work ethic than in others. But the distinguished economist James Robinson, co-author of Why Nations Fail, proposes an alternative answer. He says it’s all to do with how a nation is governed and the strength of its institutions. Presenter: David Edmonds P ..read more

Humans are a unique species in many ways, but an important one is that we communicate with sophisticated language, using words and grammar. So how does language work? Is there a single mechanism in the brain, or multiple mechanisms? Is it useful to learn a second language – what are the cognitive advantages to being bilingual? Cathy Price is a neuroscientist and a leading expert in language. Presenter David Edmonds Producer Ben Cooper Image: A man delivering a speech (Credit: BBC ..read more

Are trees intelligent? We think of humans as intelligent – maybe animals too. But vegetation? Well, one of the world’s leading tree researchers, Suzanne Simard, insists that trees should be seen as intelligent. They communicate with each other. They help each other. They are even able to distinguish between their offspring and stranger trees. She calls the network of tree communication the wood wide web. And she believes that her discoveries should alter our relationship to trees, woods and forests. Presenter: David Edmonds Producer: Ben Cooper (Photo: US-Fall_Shenandoah, Credit: Getty Images ..read more

What is the cause of famine? The obvious answer is shortage of food. But, says the Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen that misses a vital point. In his research on famines, he showed that there’s usually enough food to go around – it just doesn’t reach the people who need it. Often that’s because news of food scarcity hasn’t been widely publicised. In democracies people don’t starve to death, he says, because there’s always pressure on the politicians to alleviate suffering. Presenter David Edmonds Producer Ben Cooper (Image: Bengal Famine, Credit: Getty Images ..read more

Do black woman face more prejudice than black men or white women? The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced a new way of thinking about disadvantage in society. She called it ‘intersectionality’. It attempts to analyze how different forms of marginalization – race, class, gender and so on – overlap. And it has been hugely influential on those academics and policy makers who deal with the nature and impact of discrimination. Presenter David Edmonds ..read more

Are we all racist? Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji is the architect of what is arguably psychology’s most influential experiment. It’s called the Implicit Association Test (the IAT) and it has been taken millions and millions of times. It purports to be a measure of our unconscious bias towards various groups – e.g. blacks, women, the old or the disabled. Most people taking the IAT do exhibit some kind of bias. That leads to two questions – how worried should we be at these implicit attitudes, and what could be done about them? Presented by David Edmonds (Image: Question marks, Credit: Shutt ..read more

How do you stop different groups hating each other? Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East. Muslims and Hindus in India. Is building walls between them the solution? According to Miles Hewstone, of Oxford University, what’s really needed is contact – the more you are exposed to people in another group, the less you distrust and fear them. Presented by David Edmonds (Image: doves, Credit: Shutterstock ..read more

Many criminal court cases rest on eye-witness accounts of what happened. There’s a problem though. Elizabeth Loftus – one of the world’s most influential psychologists – has shown in numerous experiments that memory is not nearly as reliable as we once believed. It is easy to alter memories. It’s even quite easy to implant entirely false memories – making people believe they remember something which never occurred. Presented by David Edmonds (Photo: Brain and eraser, Credit: Shutterstock ..read more

Some people are addicted to drugs, others to alcohol. Addicts often crave a substance, and yet when they inject or consume it, it doesn’t bring them any pleasure. David Edmonds finds out how humans can want something, but not like it ..read more