The week on radio

We are living in the Decade of the Brain. You could be forgiven for not noticing it in a week when we have been incessantly reminded that the destinies of great men can be decided by other, pinker lumps of flesh. On the other hand, you could see this latest bout of todger-baiting as a reminder that the brain is indeed a physical thing - "a double handful of wet, grey matter", as Sheena McDonald put it on Monday's Beyond the Millennium on Radio 4.

This week's programme had Floyd Bloom - a name he should probably change if he wants to avoid being mistaken for a fictional character - laying out his prospectus for the brain in the year 2010: a brain scanner on every kitchen table, mental problems controlled by fiddling with the brain's mechanics, assessing and correcting likely personality defects and career problems.

He didn't get fazed by philosophical problems - like, what happens to personal identity? Will the corrected personality be able to claim to have free will? - and at the end conceded the possibility of a soul. But it's hard to see how he could genuinely reconcile himself to the idea of an immaterial soul when he's proposing to alter it by shunting around the meat it's packaged in.

On Altered States, on Radio 4 on Wednesday evening, Vivienne Parry discovered how shunting around the mind could have an effect on the packaging, through the mysterious power of hypnosis - a woman is told that her hated father has hit her and two red weals appear on her skin, that sort of thing.

This is fascinating, but rather pointless. The stated aim of the series is to explore the mind's workings by looking at it under peculiar conditions, but there wasn't a lot of theorising going on here. Parry ended by wondering if it really matters whether we understand hypnotism, and concluding "As long as it works, who cares?" This is not the kind of attitude cultivated by the great scientists of history - Archimedes leaps out of his bath yelling "Fetch a mop, there's water all over the floor", Isaac Newton looks at the apple and mutters "Ah, sod it - if it falls, it falls" - and it left the programme looking like a Believe-It-Or-Not-style compendium of crazy hypnosis facts, and not even a very amusing or surprising one.

Elsewhere, radio has, like everybody else, been embarrassingly uncerebral over the whole Clinton business. It has been the occasion for some good and pacy journalism but also some absurd attempts to induce a sense of drama. The low point was James Cox's ringing declaration on The World This Weekend, last Sunday, that America had awoken to find that reality could be worse than any nightmare. Actually, my nightmares regularly feature Bill Clinton urging me to lie about oral sex.

What it all goes to show, though, is that when it comes to the mind and the body, it's the body we're really interested in. Tinker with the mind all you like. Who's going to notice?