During the Vietnam War, the US bombed Laos more heavily than any other country had been bombed before. Spanning over three presidential terms, it was the largest covert CIA operation in US history. Today, the Laos people live among, and risk their lives to clear, over 80 million unexploded bombs on their doorsteps. With great beauty and empathy, this doc reveals the unbelievable stories of the men and women at the forefront of this monumental task....

Learn how language has allowed humans to develop math, build a capacity for logic, categorize the world around us, develop the concept of metaphor, and construct narratives. While we take each of these functions for granted every day because they feel so natural, none would have been possible without language.

What did the very earliest forms of human language sound like? Learn why many researchers believe hand gesture was actually our first attempt at language. From embodied brains to the widespread prevalence of gesture, from its human uniqueness to its many benefits for us, the evidence suggests that language was born in the body and grew up from there.

Explore many of the evolutionary features that help babies prepare for successful communication, including the social cues that help them identify specific word meanings in an almost limitless sea of options. Consider the power of pupillary contagion as it activates the brain networks involved in perspective taking and the crucial social skill known as theory of mind.

Explore the brain structures of babies that give them their extraordinary auditory abilities, and why it's so difficult for adults to learn new languages. Discover how exposure to our native language actually changes our brain, removing our ability to access objective auditory information in the environment, and why we each perceive a uniquely distorted world.

Did the human brain evolve a specialized "mental organ" designed for language? Or was language a product of cultural evolution? Examine our relationship to the human microbiome as an analogy. We aren't born with the bacteria in our microbiome, but our biology is extraordinarily receptive to them. And once combined, the relationship transforms us and our abilities, very similar to language.

See why language truly is an example of emergentism, and why language production cannot fully be understood without considering how human brains connect to each other. Then, probe the fascinating workings of the mirror neuron system, neural synchrony, and the significance of the N400 response, as you discover why face-to-face interactions are so crucial for optimal communication.

Investigate how the plasticity of the brain allows us to "cobble together" a neural network for reading and writing as we mature, using dyslexia and synesthesia to illustrate this networking property. This network develops at different times for different people, but no one is born with it; our "reading brain" is truly a technological transformation.

While there is no single gene for language or any other complex human system, specific aspects of the human genome and our biology create the perfect biological environment for the development of language. Explore the important relationship between the brain's Broca's and Wernicke's areas and the significance of the gene FOXP2. Could language be "a new machine built out of old parts"?

What is the human mind and how could it have developed language? Learn why dualism, materialism, structuralism, and reductionism (all captivating and forward-thinking mind models of their time) have each come up short. Instead, explore the fascinating concept of emergentism and learn why this model offers the best framework for understanding the development of language.