Brenda Wineapple: When Evolution Was on Trial

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.