Alice Fraser starts this series by telling a story about how the world is speeding up. How did we get to a place where everything is so fast all the time? A place where we have no time to slow down. She chats to Robert Colville, an author who has written about the history of speeding up.

Ash talks to Brigid Schulte. She wrote a book called Overwhelmed: How To Love Work And Play When No One Has The Time. She says technology and time management are taking over our lives and making us more and more distracted. And that is actually changing our brains. The episode will end with the author and journalist Robert Wright talking about the idea of the red pill in the Matrix. He tells Alice we have deluded ourselves for too long but there is a way out: meditation.

Alice tells Ash her own story of growing up in a Buddhist family. She says meditation allowed her to consider her emotions more but she doesn’t know why. What is it about that helps us deal with our emotions?

To answer Ash goes back to Robert Wright who explains why we are so emotional in the first place. He says the main problem is we are not in as much control of our minds as we think. That’s because of evolution. But according to the neuroscientist Sara Lazar it’s also because of something else - this tiny part of our brains that controls our emotional response called the amygdala. Sara explains that meditation provides a pause between experiencing something and reacting this. This insight chimes with Alice’s experience of meditating.

Alice travels to Cambridge. She understands the experience of meditation but now she wants to know whether it actually changes the brain in any fundamental way. She has her brain imaged by the scientist Barbara Jachs, who is trying to work out the relationship between meditation and brain activity. This is now a mainstream area of science but it wasn’t always that way.

Ash chats to Daniel Goleman who wrote the book The Science of Meditation. It turns out Dan was one of the first researchers to start studying this idea that meditation can change the brain. The idea was radical back then but a certain scientific theory changed everything: neuroplasticity. This theory has helped scientists realise meditation strengthens brain circuits like doing reps in the gym strengthens your muscles. Ash also talks to Sara Lazar about a pioneering study she did that shows meditation can make fundamental changes to the brain after just 8 weeks of practice.

So we know what meditation is and that it’s backed up by science but how does it actually work for people in different situations? To answer that we bring back Robert Wright who explains how meditation can help with our tribal political world.

Then the reformed drug kingpin, Fleet Maull, demonstrates how meditation can be helpful in the most stressful of circumstances - a federal prison. Finally NBA coach George Mumford tells the story of how he ended up teaching Michael Jordan how to meditate.

Alice has some questions about meditation in the modern world. She grew up a Buddhist and is sometimes worried meditation has become too corporate. Ash has a couple of stories about the history of meditation that might help with her concerns.

The first takes place at labyrinth in the east of England. Here Ash learns about a secular history of meditation. Then it’s off to pre-colonial Burma (unfortunately not literally). Ash interviews the historian Erik Braun about Ledi Sayadaw, the man who spread meditation to the masses.

So now we know all about meditation but in this episode we want to try and understand how to actually establish a meditation practice. So Ash and Alice turn to the US TV anchor Dan Harris. Dan used to think meditation was bullshit but now he is something of an evangelist. He tells his story and explains that maintaining a meditation practice is hard but if you can do it it really does have long-term benefits.