Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Everyone from the most simple-minded to the deepest thinking has pondered a question that strikes at the core of our existence: Is there life after death? What happens to the soul after we die? People who have had near-death experiences claim to have visited the other side before getting yanked back into consciousness. Now, some of the brightest minds in science are trying to understand how life can persist beyond the physical and what will it look like. It might be a quantum state based on the fundamental laws of the universe. Ultimately, it is a journey that struggles to decode the most complicated instrument in the universe: the human brain.

Dr Michael Mosley traces the sinister ways the experimental psychology has used to try to control our minds. He finds that the pursuit of mind control has led to some truly horrific experiments and left many casualties in its wake. Extraordinary archive captures what happened - scientists systematically change the behaviour of children; law abiding citizens give fatal electric shocks; a gay man has electrodes implanted in his head in an attempt to turn his sexuality. Michael takes a hallucinogenic drug as part of a controlled experiment to try to understand how its mind-bending properties can change the brain. This is a scientific journey goes to the very heart of what we hold most dear - our free will, and our ability to control our own destiny.

The film tells the tale of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a landmark experiment to see if an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. This study was the brainchild of Dr. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist who hoped to teach Nim enough language that he could eventually express what he was thinking and feeling. This would refute Noam Chomsky's thesis that language is inherent only in humans, hence his moniker, a direct pun on the famous linguists' name. The doc was a smash when it played at Sundance with this entirely different incredible but true story

Horizon explores the strange and wonderful world of illusions – and reveals the tricks they play on our senses and why they fool us. We show how easy it is to trick your sense of taste by changing the colours of food and drink, explain how what you see can change what you hear, and see just how unreliable our sense of colour can be. But all this trickery has a serious purpose. It’s helping scientists to create a new understanding of how our senses work – not as individual senses, but connected together. It holds the intriguing possibility that one sense could be mapped into another.

We now know that the brain - the organ that more than any other makes us human - is one of the wonders of the universe, and yet until the 17th century it was barely studied. The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires. And the search to understand how our brains work has also revealed that we are all - whether we realise it or not - carrying out science from the moment we are born.

The Spirit Molecule investigates dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a naturally occurring psychoactive compound, which exists in humans, and potentially every living organism. Utilizing Dr. Rick Strassman's government-sanctioned, human DMT research as the documentary's backbone, the study's potential impact and its inconceivable revelations emerge. A closer examination of DMT's effects through two traditionally opposed concepts, science and spirituality, The Spirit Molecule unravels the connections between cutting-edge neuroscience, quantum mechanics and human spirituality.
The Spirit Molecule, a simple molecule with enormous implications. The subtle combination of science, spirituality, and philosophy results in an abundance of incredible ideas and theories that could alter the way we understand the nature of reality and our relationship to it.