Summary: With cutting-edge experiments and intriguing case studies, this program explores the science of dreams-revealing their impact on our memories, learning processes, and mental health. Contrasting REM-sleep dreams with those occurring in non-REM sleep, the film examines the roles of the amygdala and the parietal lobe and the ways in which depression and stroke affect, or are affected by, dream...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program draws on insightful commentary from literary scholars and authors to examine the characters, plots, and themes of seven American novels that deal with wealth, poverty, and the nature of success and failure in the U.S. In an exploration that moves from the turn of the 20th century into progressively more contemporary surroundings, passages from each book are dramatized through...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
View online at AVOD
Summary: Do our brains store experiences from our first few months of life? What happens to children who witness disturbing events before age two? How does being unwanted affect a baby? This program explores the personal significance of memory and examines the developmental stages at which meaningful awareness is formed. Visiting a group of 25 children, the film observes them as they turn two years old...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Why do dreams occur? What is their function? What do they mean? This provocative program looks at the facts and examines the theories, from Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams to today's neuroscience laboratory findings. The program visits a sleep research lab to explain REM sleep; another lab where researchers are using positron emission tomography (PET scanning) to explore the dreaming...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: This luminous biography combines numerous examples of Salvador Dali's work, dreamlike imagery derived from it, and enigmatic appearances by the painter in archival footage. Interviews with art historians and friends of the Catalonian master offer insight into his strange childhood, his turbulent studies in Madrid, and his emergence as a surrealist and pre-pop icon; his ambivalence toward...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: After a traumatic shock, most people experience immediate symptoms of stress-and for some, the feelings do not fade away. In this program, psychiatrist Cecile Rousseau, psychologist Deogratias Bagilishya, and other specialists in the field of emotional trauma discuss the causes, symptoms, and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. The effects of adrenaline and cortisol on the body and the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: What does a mirror tell us about light? This cluster of 11 computer-animated video units delves into one aspect of light's behavior-reflection. Euclid's geometric optics and his findings on the perception of distance and perspective lead to a discussion of the Law of Reflection-linking angle of incidence with angle of reflection-and the concepts of absorption, transmission, and diffuse...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: What happens to the body during sleep? This program explores the mystery of REM sleep, shows a computer display of the waves that sweep across the brain during sleep, and presents extraordinary footage of a cat "acting out" its dreams. The analogy of sleep to a ship on automatic pilot graphically illustrates how some functions must and do continue while the conscious brain is asleep.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: A century after the debut of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, the neurobiological approach to understanding the subconscious is yielding to an integrated psycho-bio-sociological model. Following a concise overview of Freudian theory, NewsHour correspondent Terence Smith moderates a discussion with cognitive neuroscientist Robert Stickgold, of Harvard Medical School, and psychoanalyst...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: The 1950s in America were a time of nostalgia and neurosis. Factories poured out goods, the dollar was powerful, and the United States - filled with the heady optimism of victory in World War II - believed that it could politically, culturally, and militarily lead the world. But the decade also saw the solidification of the Iron Curtain in Europe, the entrenchment of Communism in China, years...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1984
View online at AVOD
Summary: Theo and Polly host a party in Dream Park to celebrate their daughter Hermia's engagement to James, but when Xander, Hermia's true love, shows up to dispute the betrothal, it takes magical intervention to set things right. Peter Bowker adapts Shakespeare's unusual romantic comedy where the problems of mortal love are mirrored in interlocking plots between Fairyland and the modern world. Bill...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Through wars, depressions, and social upheavals, the West has accommodated to change while remaining a mythical land of freedom and possibility. The ghosts of the buffalos are still stirring. Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood have given way to Native American artists; Indians-once the subjects of painting-have become its practitioners. So the myth regenerates itself and the American...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Chilean novelist Isabel Allende has sold 15 million books in 30 languages over the past two decades. Few living writers receive the critical acclaim, popular following, and consistent sales records that she has enjoyed since the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits, in 1982. And yet her own story of exile after the rise of the dictator Pinochet is, perhaps, the most...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: Illumination, darkness, and the mysterious region in between-three basic components of the painted image. This program describes ways that artists have manipulated light over the centuries, and examines religious, psychological, and aesthetic reasons behind their innovations. Viewers will encounter medieval depictions of Biblical narratives and the luminous work of Renaissance and Baroque...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007