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Dementia playlists and musical memory

Listening to the right music can provide both solace and pleasure for someone with dementia, helping them to reconnect with the world around them. Grace Meadows makes the case for more music in dementia care.

How music opens the doors of memory and the mind

People living with dementia can often still listen, perform or move to music. What does this tell us about how memories are formed?

The Key to Memory: Use art to articulate

Danny Rees explains what William Utermohlen’s self-portraits can tell us about how and why we remember.

Rehab centres and the ‘cure’ for addiction

Guy Stagg takes us on a brief history of rehab centres and their approaches to addiction and recovery.

A brief history of tattoos

The earliest evidence of tattoo art dates from 5000 BC, and the practice continues to hold meaning for many cultures around the world.

We are from here, but not from here

Novelist JJ Bola on being a refugee with a British passport and what that placenessless means for a search for identity.

The Martians are coming

For over a hundred years, antagonistic alien invaders have been a popular focus for the imagined end of the world. But the destructive consequences of human behaviour is far more frightening.

Finding the words to talk about emptiness

Shored up by a diagnosis and medication, Cassie Doney tried to find out more about the profound feeling of emptiness they were experiencing. But research is thin on the ground.

Another way to listen

Background noise is something we often try to ignore. Adjoa Wiredu explores what happens if we intentionally choose to tune in.

Synaesthesia, or when senses overlap

What’s it like to see heartbeats, taste Tube stations or hear paintings?

Parks and politics in Brixton’s past and present

Gentrification is creeping along Railton Road, but racial inequality still lingers in memories of the 1980s, and in the continuing lack of green-space access.

‘Jessy’, a film about cerebral palsy

How the 1950s British film industry portrayed this disease.

Daria Martin on ‘Sensorium Tests’ and ‘At the Threshold’

Doris Day blows against

Dodie Bellamy remembers a heady summer watching Doris Day grimace and gust in vintage movies, her expressive exhalations changing her onscreen world with a puff.

Unravelling genetic origins from the potato to cinchona

Starting with the humble potato, Nataly Allasi Canales reveals how researchers unearth the genetic origins of modern plant varieties, and explains why their work is so important for biodiversity.

How do advertisers get inside our heads?

Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.

Shakespeare and the four humours

Blood. Phlegm. Black bile. Yellow bile. The theory of the four humours informed many of Shakespeare's best-known characters, including the phlegmatic Falstaff.

Appointments with plants

In our ‘always on’ culture, poet Elizabeth-Jane Burnett find a route away from screens – by following the ways of the trees and plants outside.

Healing through ink

Taking an approach learned from his OCD treatment, Josh Weeks faced his fear of getting tattoos, and embraced inking as part of the healing process.

The ‘epileptic’ in art and science

From scarred outsiders in literature to the cold voyeurism of medical films and photography, people who experience seizures and epilepsy are rarely shown in a compassionate light in popular culture.

The cures and demons of sleep paralysis

Discover the murky past of sleep paralysis, the terrifying disorder once associated with demonic possession

Natural eating in Jamaica and the Caribbean

Riaz Phillips is passionate about the Jamaican food he grew up with and plant-based Caribbean food he came to later, like roti, baiganee and vegan stews and curries. Here he explores the origins and surging popularity of these natural ‘health foods’.

The healing power of breathing

The healing powers of different breathing methods are said to help with a range of health challenges, from asthma to PTSD. Effie Webb traces their spiritual origins and explores the modern proliferation of breathwork therapies.

The quest to breed gifted children

If you had the chance, would you choose a genius baby?

Artificial intelligence and the dream of eternal life

Until now, eternal life was the stuff of fiction, or in the unknowable realms of religion. But an artificial intelligence that ‘remembers’ the whole of an individual’s experience could be the way to life after death.