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"Professor Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London explores what happens inside our heads when we recognise a friend or reach for a cup of coffee."

Can we trust the memory of court witnesses?

"The physiology of panic, fear and arousal in cinemagoers; the evolutionary psychology of leadership; plus, robonauts and holographic communications"

"One of our true superstars of nonfiction." That's how David Foster Wallace described Lewis Hyde. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Lewis Hyde talks about his book, "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art." This classic text introduces us to the playful and disruptive side of imagination embodied in trickster mythology. Lewis Hyde is the author of the acclaimed "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art." He talks with Steve Paulson about the meaning of the word "trickster." His book explores the cultural history of such infamous Trickster figures as Loki and Monkey."

The science of smelling and scent.

"Six leading planetary scientists debate whether Pluto is a planet in a broadcast of the Hayden Planetarium's 2009 Isaac Asimov lecture. "

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet. Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption - and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

Award-winning filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and astrophysicist Piet Hut discuss what chaos is and what it means when it comes to the universe.

Famed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and theoretical physicist Brian Greene dissect time as we know it. What is the smallest unit of time, and what does it look like? For starters, you should stop looking at the clock, and start looking at the universe.

"From NPR Science Correspondent Robert Krulwich: Through Juliet's lips, Shakespeare said "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." But the Bard may have been wrong - names do matter. Language researchers say your sense of the rose depends on what you call it."

Biologist Stewart Firestein and world-renowned perfumer Christophe Laudamiel team up to tackle the science of smell.

"If the police want to search your house, they need a warrant. If they want to follow you around in an unmarked car, they don't. But what about GPS technology? It's highly accurate, virtually effortless and law enforcement are using it like never before. But the courts are divided on the legality of GPS and the issue seems destined for the Supreme Court. Law professor Orrin Kerr explains."

"As people have become more and more dependent on the Internet, some have concerns that all that information (and the devices that help us connect to it) could be doing seriously damage to the way we think, interact and learn. But Nick Bilton, lead writer for the New York Times Bits Blog, explains in his new book that he's lived his whole life connected and managed to turn out just fine. He says scientific research backs up his experience."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain. For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study. Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate. Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment. The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol. More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar. Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests John Barrow, Colva Roney-Dougal and Marcus du Sautoy explore the unintended consequences of mathematical discoveries, from the computer to online encryption, to alternating current and predicting the path of asteroids. In his book The Mathematician's Apology (1941), the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy expressed his reverence for pure maths, and celebrated its uselessness in the real world. Yet one of the branches of pure mathematics in which Hardy excelled was number theory, and it was this field which played a major role in the work of his younger colleague, Alan Turing, as he worked first to crack Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and then on one of the first computers. Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the many surprising and completely unintended uses to which mathematical discoveries have been put."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests David Jackson, Dorothy Rowe and Alastair Wright discuss the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, focusing on his most famous painting, The Scream. First exhibited in 1893 in Berlin, The Scream was the culmination of Munch's magnum opus, a series of paintings called The Frieze of Life. This depicted the course of human existence through burgeoning love and sexual passion to suffering, despair and death, in Munch's highly original, proto-expressionist style. His titles, from Death in the Sickroom, through Madonna to The Vampire, suggest just how directly and unironically he sought to depict the anxieties of late-19th century Europe. But against all Munch's images, it is The Scream which stands out as the work which has seared itself into the Western imagination. It remains widely celebrated for capturing the torment of existence in what appeared to many in Munch's time to be a frightening, godless world. Munch himself endured a childhood beset by illness, madness and bereavement. At 13, he was told by his father that his tuberculosis was fatal. But he survived and went on to become a major figure first in the Norwegian, then the European, avant-garde. He became involved with two of the great playwrights of the period. He collaborated with his fellow countryman Henrik Ibsen and became a close friend of the tempestuous Swede August Strindberg. He admired the work of Post-Impressionist painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom influenced his art. Munch's own influence resonated through the 20th century, from German Expressionism to Andy Warhol and beyond. His work, particularly The Scream, remains powerful today."

"Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss imaginary numbers. In the sixteenth century, a group of mathematicians in Bologna found a solution to a problem that had puzzled generations before them: a completely new kind of number. For more than a century this discovery was greeted with such scepticism that the great French thinker Rene Descartes dismissed it as an "imaginary" number. The name stuck - but so did the numbers. Long dismissed as useless or even fictitious, the imaginary number i and its properties were first explored seriously in the eighteenth century. Today the imaginary numbers are in daily use by engineers, and are vital to our understanding of phenomena including electricity and radio waves."

"David Cannadine reflects on the teaching of history in schools and the moves at home and abroad to reform the curriculum and re-write the textbooks."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of animals in humankind's search for knowledge. Since the Greek physician Galen used pigs for anatomical studies in the 2nd century, animals have been used by scientists to further human knowledge. Yet few, if any subjects in this country, raise such violent feelings and passions as animals and their place in our society. With the growing politicisation of animal rights, it is a subject which is increasing in intensity. Do animals have rights and do our needs permit us to use them still to enhance our own lives in the twentieth century? Is it still necessary to experiment on animals for the good of humankind? Or is that morally unacceptable and barbaric - particularly in the light of new research into animal consciousness? With Colin Blakemore, Professor of Physiology, Oxford University, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Royal Society and targeted in the 1980s by animal welfare activists protesting at his research methods; Dr Lynda Birke, biologist, teacher at Lancaster and Warwick Universities, and previously worked for 7 years in animal behaviour at the Open University."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of geography and ecology in determining world history since civilisation began. The 18th century historian Thomas Carlyle said that world history was the history of what great men have accomplished, but this understanding of history is being increasingly called into question. Professor Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, which won the 1998 Rhone Poulenc Prize for Science and the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, is a re-evaluation of the last 13,000 years of the history of mankind - particularly in the light of geography and ecology. But what are the implications of looking at world history as being determined by geography and ecology? Is environment really the determining factor in history? And if so, what role does cultural heritage play in shaping different histories? With Professor Jared Diamond, ecologist and physiologist at the Los Angeles Medical School, University of California, and author of Guns, Germs and Steel; Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University."