Self-driving cars and the pedestrian, Risk tolerance in the brain, Awards nominee

All in the Mind

Claudia Hammond's guest is University of Cambridge clinical psychologist Tim Dalgleish

The vision of autonomous vehicles on our roads is becoming a reality, but in order for driverless cars to succeed, not only does the technology need to be faultless, but it's essential they can interact with pedestrians safely. So we need to know more about how pedestrians deal with the cars. Claudia Hammond takes a driverless ride with Prof Ed Galea of the University of Greenwich who's just conducted a trail to assess the detailed response of other road users.

Some of us are much more likely to take risks than others. One way of spotting the risk-takers is to look at how they behave, but do our brains hold clues as well. Joe Kable, Associate Professor of Psychology at the university of Pennsylvania, has unravelled the system in the brain that could help predict the degrees of risk we're prepared to take.

And Claudia meets the third of the nine finalists for the All in the Mind Awards 2018. We hear from Maddie, a professional actor- nominated by her childhood friend and now health economist Stephanie.