Over the past two decades the strides of neuroscience have resulted in basic psychological functions as well as mental disorders being widely understood in biological terms. How robust is this neurological account of the mind? In these six panel discussions neuroscientists meet with writers, artists, philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts to explore how the varying languages which probe mind and brain can talk to each other meaningfully.

How much of who we are is brain and how much is mind? How much cognition goes on outside awareness? To what extent is thought shaped by emotional and motivational factors? Do we still believe in anything like a Freudian unconscious? How do we acquire the competence to relate to the minds of others? When we talk of disorders of the mind, are we primarily talking biologically? Is neurobiological 'hard wiring' itself dependent on certain types of emotional experience and on environmental triggers? Can disorders such as autism shed any light on these processes? Are male and female brains different from one another – and how? Darwinians sympathetic to sociobiology have argued that there are strong reasons why sex differences will be especially marked in mammalian species such as our own. Does neuroscience bear this claim out? And what is the relation between neuroscience and evolutionary theory more generally?

These are some of the many questions this series explores.

• The Brain, Free Will and the Inner Life
• Darwin, Biology and the Brain's Order and Disorders
• The Workings of Empathy
• Autism and the Concept of Psychological Normality
• The Gendered Brain
• You Must Remember This
• How Well Does Freud's Work Stand the Test of Time?