The idea of the brain

Join Matthew Cobb on a journey through centuries of wild philosophical speculations, inspired mechanical insights and blood-curdling experiments, all aimed at fathoming the mysteries of the most complex object in the known universe: the three-pound organ between your ears. Along the way you’ll meet some of the greatest scientists in history and you’ll see how even our mistaken ideas about how the brain works have transformed the world. Investigate whether our frontal lobes might be antennae picking up signals from another plane. Find out why, no matter how we try to squash the pseudoscience of phrenology, it keeps popping up elsewhere. Discover the great unsolved questions about how the brain what it does. And make a tour of the horizon over which the next great breakthrough might be about to appear.