Episode 3

Author and journalist Charlotte Higgins explores our ancient fascination with mazes and labyrinths, and reflects on their significance - in art and in mythology, in literature and in life.

In this third reading from her new book Higgins investigates some mental mazes, and Sigmund Freud's view that psychoanalysis "supplies the thread that leads a man out of the labyrinth of his own unconscious."

She also describes the neuroscience behind the human being's sense of direction, the enlarged hippocampi of London cabbies, and how, on some level, "finding our way through life, building up stories about ourselves and making meaningful memories out of our experiences, may be twined together with our ability to navigate..."

Red Thread is written and read by Charlotte Higgins.

The book is abridged and produced by David Jackson Young.