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We experience ourselves as conscious, intelligent beings making free choices, but CrowdScience listener Mohammed isn’t so sure.

He’s a Ghanaian living in Berlin, and he’s been reading about how bacteria in our gut can influence our mood and cravings, and about how complex behaviour can arise from simpler parts, like the intelligence of a colony emerging from thousands of relatively simple ants.

That made him wonder: does human intelligence and free will actually exist? Could it be that we are fundamentally shaped, or even ‘piloted’ by the sophisticated chemical and biological systems within us, like our microbiome, our hormones, or the molecular interactions in our brains?

Presenter Caroline Steel gathers all of her supposed intelligence to find an answer. She speaks to psychologists and neuroscientists, discovering research that suggests our brains make decisions before we are consciously aware of it.

She even becomes the unwitting victim of a magic trick that makes her wonder whether our brains are as reliable as we think. Are we really in control, or are we just puppets of the chemical reactions in our brain?