How do times spent reflecting help us to better understand our experiences? See what MIT researchers have shown in lab rats who replay memories after first learning a maze.

It seldom happens when we go through a day without experiencing stress. We are especially familiar with these feelings when they build up after a long day at work or while studying for a difficult final exam. In our modern industrialized world, it is more difficult now than ever to avoid stress, and some experts say this is leading to many unforeseen health-related problems.

Deepak Chopra delivers an excellent lecture, elegantly touching on topics like theoretical physics, neuroscience, and Buddhist meditation. He goes on to explain how these have all contributed to a new science of consciousness.

This great BBC clip shows how certain animals can be put into hypnotic trance. Evolutionary biologists theorize that these states may be used as a defense mechanism to avoid predators.

“The human brain contains over 100 billion neurons, and roughly 1 quintillion synapses. But how did it all get started? How did the first nervous systems, the first brains evolve? How did a bunch of simple cells evolve into a biological computer?”

“Listen closely — Marvin Minsky’s arch, eclectic, charmingly offhand talk on health, overpopulation and the human mind is packed with subtlety: wit, wisdom and just an ounce of wily, is-he-joking? advice.”

Fellow atheists Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, and Daniel Dennet, an American philosopher of science, discuss the meaning of life and death.

Thomas Szasz is a psychiatrist and academic. Since 1990 he has been Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse. He is a prominent figure in the antipsychiatry movement.

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”