Extraordinary Powers of the Human Body
Extraordinary Powers of the Human Body
Extraordinary Powers of the Human Body
50 min • 2017 • M

This stunning series aims to decrypt the mechanisms of the human body and brain through exceptional experiments, as well as reports on women and men who stretch their physical and mental limits. 15 x 2 hour programmes have aired on France 2 since 2012 attracting large audiences - this 6 part series selects the very best of them. Featured stories examine: How our skeleton regenerates entirely every 10 years; Why we only use 10% of our pulmonary capacities; Why the sense of vertigo is 100% caused by psychological factors; How feel-good hormones secreted by our brain can save our life.

Ratings:
The Power of Our Senses
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1. The Power of Our Senses
50 mins

In the first episode of the series we meet people who can see, hear, touch, taste and smell in ways that the rest of us simply cannot. Through meeting an eagle-eyed fighter pilot, a man with some of the best hearing in the business, one of the world’s leading chocolate tasters, a tetrachromatic artist and some of the world’s top tight-rope walkers we will gain insight and understanding of how our senses work and how some people are able to experience the world in very different ways to the rest of us.

The Power of our Muscles
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2. The Power of our Muscles
48 mins

Muscles are an essential building block of the human body. We all have the same number of them and they can all do the same things except that some people have trained their muscles to enable them to do things that are a little out of the ordinary. In this episode, we meet a free-diving couple, both able to hold their breath for minutes at a time, incredible contortionists, brick breaking karate experts and the French Olympic swimming team and as always, we will uncover the science behind what is happening in their bodies.

How our Powers Change Through the Ages
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3. How our Powers Change Through the Ages
48 mins

As we get older our bodies change as does what we are able to do and not do. In this episode, we explore the science of ageing meeting along the way a nonagenarian great grandmother who seems to be defying science, a young mountain trained athlete able to perform at altitude, some amazing middle-aged runners and a French synchronised swimming champion back in the pool aged 50. We will meet them all and explore with them the realities of how our bodies change over time.

Our Powers of Adaptation
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4. Our Powers of Adaptation
49 mins

In this episode, we look at how our bodies have evolved through time and how our powers have changed through the ages. We will meet a man who has lived with wolves, another who eats a Palaeolithic diet and another who can communicate with wild animals all in our efforts to understand how our brains have evolved through time, why we look the way we do and to trace the origins of language.

The Powers of the Brain
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5. The Powers of the Brain
50 mins

The human brain is a marvel of biological engineering and whilst the basics of each of our brains are the same there are also very real differences between us both in terms of what we are born able to do and also what we can teach ourselves to do. In this episode, we meet a super-linguist, able to speak more than 30 languages fluently, a six-year old chess champion, a memory master and one of France’s best magicians as we explain just wat our amazing brains are capable of!

Our Power to Heal Ourselves
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6. Our Power to Heal Ourselves
50 mins

The human body is truly extraordinary and rarely more so than in its ability to take care of itself. In this episode, we look at how we can optimise our health and maximise our own powers. With the help of our trademark, state of the art, scientific explanations...we meet a master of meditation and also some children just starting mindfulness classes, a psychiatrist able to hypnotise himself as well as a therapist using hypnosis as a form of anaesthetic and in Iceland we look at how the island nation’s people stay healthy through the long, dark winters.

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