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Senses

Senses. We've all got them. But how do they work?

Making sense of senses lost

In rapid succession, Steve Barker suddenly lost sight and hearing on his left side. The effect on how he perceives the world has been profound.

Synaesthesia, or when senses overlap

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

Humans, animals and the sensory world

Artists and medics through the ages have made links between our discerning human senses and similar traits in animals. Discover how close we are to the earth’s other inhabitants.

Finding consolation in social isolation

Feeling isolated and anxious during the lockdowns of the last year, Tanya Perdikou found solace in reconnecting to her past and reaching out to neighbours in the present.

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

How light pollution affects our circadian rhythms

Too much of the wrong sort of light can send our natural cycles off-kilter – is city life messing with your circadian rhythm?

How writing helps me manage schizophrenia

For Erica Crompton, writing is much more than a career. It’s an essential component of her mental health toolkit.

Rebuilding my identity after a brain injury

Chris Miller talks about how a brain injury forced him to reassess his place in the world – physically, personally and socially.

Migraine, creativity and me

Novelist Lydia Ruffles explores how migraine has made her mind stretch, shrink, widen and change, and how it’s influenced her art.

The seizure dog

Aparna Nair's dog Charlie made her feel safe in the world. His uncanny ability to sense when she was about to experience a seizure also gave her an unexpected ally in her struggles with epilepsy.

Virtual reality and the fix of the future

Virtual reality, with its complex sensory tricks, takes us beyond the real world. Find out how these potentially addictive experiences can harm us – or might even have therapeutic uses.

How ritual creates meaning

In a world that encourages us to quash our sense of wonder, ritual can help push away apathy and nurture life-enhancing creativity and imagination.

Designing better mental health wards

Bringing colour and natural light to tired, grubby mental health wards has a measurably positive effect on patients. A few groundbreaking projects are showing the way.

Living with invisible illness

What happens when the signs of your illness are invisible to the rest of the world? Hannah Turner describes the daily struggles of living with invisible illness.

Collecting pandemic stories

Find out how personal notebook jottings from two flatmates became ‘Journals of a Pandemic’, a comprehensive diary-keeping project encompassing dozens of writers from a wide variety of backgrounds.

What writing myself has revealed

Caroline Butterwick talks to two creators about how lived experience feeds their art, and reflects on her own year of writing about her life.

Wasteland

In the final episode of ‘The Root of the Matter’, JC takes us to the wasteland. It’s a space that can teach us some of the most profound lessons about the plant world and our relationship to it.

What the nose doesn’t know

Losing her sense of smell for over a year motivated Stephanie Howard-Smith to sniff out the history of treatments for this unsettling condition.

Surviving grief when discussing death is off limits

When Iqra Choudhry’s dad died, she lost her words. Here she explains how finding a way to talk and write about loss has been essential for surviving it.

Ancestry, privacy and the family tree

Wanting to find out more about her Jamaican grandfather, Tanya Perdikou contemplates DNA testing. But first she has to consider the potential impact of unexpected results.

The side effects of lithium mining

Laura Grace Simpkins attempts to untangle some uncomfortable truths about the social and environmental costs of making her medication.

How to be poor and happy

Money, security, self-sufficiency and charitable giving have long been linked to happiness. But what if you’re working class?

The healing power of the physic garden

Having experienced the healing power of plants and gardens, Iona Glen goes in search of present-day “physic gardens” and their origins in history.

What is hysteria?

Hysteria has long been associated with fanciful myths, but its history reveals how it has been used to control women’s behaviour and bodies