Your Brain: Who's in Control? | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in threads on consciousness, anesthesia and perception as a fascinating look at how much of experience the brain constructs.
What it is
A NOVA documentary with neuroscientist Heather Berlin exploring the subconscious and what drives our decisions. It uses sleepwalking, anesthesia, improvised rap in an MRI and game theory to probe how much of the brain's work is hidden.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec lloydde · 2023-06 · on “Consciousness and Anaesthesia”
The topic, but not this exception, is touched on in “Your Brain: Who's in Control? | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS“ Episode 2 of a two-part series, premiered May 24, 2023. Both episodes are fascinating and eye opening. 08:36 Anesthesia and the Brain [this video] [LINK]
Strong rec pixl97 · 2024-03 · on “Visualization 'demonic' face distortions in a case of prosopometamorphopsia”
Perception Deception: Nova [LINK] Your Brain - Who's in control: Nova [this video] Both of these videos are great resources on how much of what you experience of reality is made up or filled in by your brain at any given moment. I believe it's the Perception Deception episode that shows us how little of our vision is actual HD quality and that an external observer doing eye tracking on you can present a different reality to you than a 3rd party looking at the same object you are (on a screen at least, little bit harder in the real world).
Recommends pixl97 · 2025-10 · on “The neurons that let us see what isn't there”
When talking about vision and what you see and don't I like bringing up the Your Brain: Perception Deception Nova PBS episode. [LINK] Also Your Brain: Who's in control Nova PBS [this video]
Cites pixl97 · 2023-09 · on “Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children”
PBS: Your Brain: Perception Deception [LINK] PBS: Your Brain: Who's in Control? [this video] Rationalization is mostly post ad hoc.
Cites seadan83 · 2024-01 · on “Focus and Flow: trade-offs in programmer productivity (2021)”
I think the title suggests larger questions. What is Flow? How many different kinds of flow states are there? To what extent are they equal? I recently listened to "Your Brain: Who's in Control?" [1], a PBS documentary that looked at a musician in an MRI rapping a memorized piece vs an ad-hoc rap. They found the musician's prefrontal cortex was inhibited when doing the ad-hoc exercise. The prefrontal cortex is used as a "filter" center, to predict and evaluate the potential outcome of actions and basically to tell you when something is a bad idea. When developers are in flow, and they are creating brand new code - do their prefrontal cortex'es also become inhibited? Is that the same kind of