All in the Mind (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Impotential (Radio 4) | iPlayer

The mind and the body – it’s a dualism that we can’t escape, even on Radio 4. Particularly on Radio 4. All in the Mind returned with Claudia Hammond for a kind of unintentional Halloween special. The lead subject was sleep paralysis, a condition suffered by around one in 20 people. It’s the sensation that you are awake but can’t move. I’ve experienced it a handful of times myself, once most severely many years ago on my own in a flophouse in Costa Rica. I woke but my body wouldn’t move. I was also aware that I couldn’t speak. No one in the world knew where I was. And I had a sudden fear that I’d be stuck, paralysed, in a cheap hotel room in San José for ever.

A few seconds later, my body came joltingly alive, as if I’d been convulsed by an electric shock. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. So I sympathised when one sufferer spoke of her serial problems with sleep paralysis. In her case, she sometimes imagined that someone, a burglar or a rapist, was in the room with her, which must be really disturbing. Apparently another common symptom is believing that someone – often a demon – is sitting on your chest.

This, as Christopher French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, noted, was the inspiration for Henry Fuseli’s famous painting, The Nightmare, of a blond maiden lying on her back with an incubus planted on her midriff. The explanation for this sensation, French suggested, is that in sleep paralysis we’re unable to take a deep breath, so it feels as if someone or something is sitting on our chest. But why do we get sleep paralysis? Put simply, it occurs when our brain wakes up but our body doesn’t.

If that doesn’t make you want to climb into bed for a relaxing nap, there is also a condition called “exploding head syndrome”. I thought that was associated with listening to Thought for the Day, but it’s actually, as French put it, “a thing, a genuine thing”. This delightful phenomenon arrives when you’re drifting off to sleep and you hear – or think you hear – a loud noise, often a scream or a door slamming, and see a blinding flash. No need to worry if you get this – it’s just an hallucination.

The mind, alas, is not always to be trusted. A recent study showed that people who are inclined to see patterns in paintings where no pattern exists are also more likely to believe in the paranormal and conspiracy theories. So the next time someone tells you a terrorist attack is a false flag operation conducted by the secret state, pull out an image of a Jackson Pollock painting and ask them to join the dots.

Impotential focused on the malfunctioning of the body, specifically that small part of it that looms so large in male self-identity: the penis. It was a programme about erectile dysfunction, something that afflicts one in 12 males and 30% of those over 65. “You could hit it with a chocolate whipping stick,” said Graham, “and nothing’s going to happen.”

What is a chocolate whipping stick? Presenter Petra Boynton wisely chose not to explore this question. Instead, she spoke to several men with differing experiences of flaccidity. Some had lost their erections owing to operations that had removed their prostates, while others were subject to psychological stress. Feme was badly beaten as a child by his father with an umbrella for the sin of having been aroused by his father’s extensive pornography collection. His mother was the informer. “Looking back,” he said, “that probably did have some kind of effect on me.”

You could say that again. This is where the dualism breaks down, because an attack on the body is always, first and foremost, an attack on the mind.