Start the Week Folgen

Andrew Marr discusses how far the brain can change and adapt with the neuroscientist Heidi Johansen-Berg. Decades ago it was thought that the adult brain was immutable but later research has shown that even brains damaged by stroke have the capacity to adapt. The writer Ben Shephard looks back to the turn of the 20th century and the birth of modern neuroscience, while the novelist Charles Fernyhough asks whether knowing more about the way the brain works will have as big an impact as the findings of Darwin and Freud. The clinical psychologist, Mark Williams, is interested in how we can relieve the despair of feeling trapped in our thoughts, and is one of the pioneers of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe talks to the director Erica Whyman about a series of plays by the RSC which focus on the idea that 'well behaved women rarely make history'. The historian Helen Castor looks back at the Middle Ages to some of the earliest roaring girls, while the soprano Joyce DiDonato brings alive Mary, Queen of Scots, the tragic hero of Donizetti's opera. The political activist Julie Bindel has been behaving badly since she came out as a lesbian in the 1970s. She looks at what it means to be gay in 2014 and whether the genuine gains that have been achieved in the last forty years have castrated a once-radical social movement. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Tom Sutcliffe discusses the history of pain with the historian Joanna Bourke, who explores how our attitude to suffering has changed through the centuries. The former Conservative MP, Norman Fowler, looks back at the public health campaign that revolutionised the fight against HIV and Aids in Britain in the 1980s, and how discrimination and political expediency are hampering prevention and treatment around the world today. The Director of the Wellcome Trust, Jeremy Farrar remembers when he was a junior doctor and patients were dying of Aids because there was no treatment. He warns that the overuse and misuse of anti-biotic drugs could herald a return to the days of untreatable diseases.Producer: Katy Hickman.