manches‘iter (iffy happy. it was when manchester city won the league today. this was a genuine shock, unlike that. won the league today. this was a genuine shock, unlike thatm won the league today. this was a genuine shock, unlike that. it was a dream come true. and it offered to the final, so even more impressive. it is an extraordinary game. you may have played, i don't know. more and more men do, boys do these days. when i was playing, it was competitive for sure, but the speed at which these women play is extraordinary. it is quite a lot faster than i played, certainly. he thought it looked a bit different, as well. the rules haven't changed. two cans should, gold shirt and call attack. they are the only two. is it not like bass kebab above the best bets taken out, is at? that is

heretical! go and watch it. the world cup is in liverpool next year. well worth going to see. my sister isa well worth going to see. my sister is a keen player of netball and i will never hear the end of its. i will never hear the end of its. i will set on you. that is it for the papers. owen and rosamund will be back at 11.30pm for another look at the papers. next on bbc news, it's meet the author. how little we know still about the brain. suzanne o'sullivan is one of our leading neurologists, and she's called her new book brainstorm: detective stories from the world of neurology. the investigation of strange symptoms, puzzling behaviour by patients, the hidden secrets in the wiring that makes us who we are. it is a book about medical science, but much more than that about people, their personalities, their behaviour, their brains. a journey of discovery where many of the answers are still tantalizingly elusive. welcome.

you say in the book at one point that neurology sometimes doesn't feel very scientific, because you're actually trying to think of the person and not the mechanism that is the brain. yes, that's right. i think that it's very surprising how little we actually know about the brain. up until the end of the 20th century, we didn't even have a mechanism by which we could look at how the brain was arranged or how it worked. so we had scans that showed still pictures of the brain, but they don't show you anything at all about how the brain is organised. we are really in the infancy of neurosciences in some ways, and also then, you are taking a person's in the context of their personal experience, and that requires a lot of listening and lot of detective work

to try and understand what you're being told. i love that phrase "detective work", which you use in the title, because what we have here is a series of stories about patients — obviously not their real names — who were exhibiting puzzling symptoms, slightly weird symptoms. they see things or they behave in a strange way that they can't explain, and you've got to start to work out what's going on from ground zero. yeah. absolutely, and i think that's something that is wonderful about being a neurologist is that you're listening to your patients' stories, and if you can hear the symptoms properly, that will actually take you on a journey into their brains in order to try and get an anatomical understanding of what's going on. without knowing it, they're often performing a self—diagnosis. well, they are telling you what's wrong with them if you can just listen clearly enough, especially people whose symptoms are fleeting, and you're relying upon their language and the way they tell the story for you to try and figure out what's wrong. well, let's give readers a flavour of this.

you tell the story in here of a man who gets from time to time, fairly irregularly, goose bumps on his arm. and then they go away. he can't work out what's going on, nor can you. this was when you were a relatively young doctor. and the consultant said, "well, have you scanned the brain?" and the discovery was that there was a brain tumour which was causing this, so the thing you see and what's going on inside are miles apart. absolutely. so if you have a problem in your arm, what you have to be able to do as a neurologist is to track that anatomically. that problem in your arm may not exist in your arm. it could be a problem in your neck, it could be a problem in your brain, and the quality of the symptoms and the way they behave are the clues as to where exactly the process is happening. and you're learning all the time, because there's a new one coming along every minute, i assume. well, precisely. because if you think of all the brain does when it's healthy. so a healthy brain sort of creates art, orfalls in love, or cries or it does maths, and therefore, everything that your brain does when it's healthy can go wrong when it's unhealthy.

and symptoms can occur in any possible combination, which means that people with brain diseases can have almost any combination of symptoms. well, give us an illustration. there are some wonderful ones in the book of the kinds of things that can happen that ordinary people would find inexplicable. yeah, so one of the people that i talk about is a young woman called august. so august has had something very bizarre happening to her since she was about 16 years old. she gets these really odd running attacks. so most of the time, august is perfectly well, but once or twice a week, she suddenly bursts into a run that is utterly outside of her control. she has no idea where she's going or how long she will run for. it stops, and she's back to normal again. that's the entire breadth of her disability. it's incredible how much it destroys her life, because if it happens in the street, she could run in front of a car. if she's upstairs, she could fall downstairs. so although it only takes up two minutes of her week sometimes, it has been utterly life—destroying.

and trying to do something about that is extraordinary difficult, because that is a one—off. yeah. i mean, with regards to brain disease, we really are very poor at healing the brain at this point. i hope there will be great strides in the nearfuture, but at the moment, we can't make people better and we're trying to teach people to live with disabilities that we've never met before, and that's very challenging. but i sense that you love that moment when you confront someone for the first time — or they confront you, rather — and you're trying to work out what's going on, how are they reacting to it, what's it doing to them? and starting to put two and two together. yes, well, i meet people who have very, very odd stories to tell. so for example, a young woman who keeps losing balance every time she tries to move. so she's perfectly well when she's sitting still. when she tries to move, she loses all the tone in her body and collapses to the ground. now, i as a doctor never encountered anything like that in medical school or in a textbook,

so to unravel that mystery and figure out why that's happening to her, you know, it's a great relief to her and i to be able to understand that. and there's a man with cartoon characters in the book. tell us about him. and i had never heard a story like this before. you know, certainly people can see, have hallucinations, but such lucid hallucinations in a mind of an intelligent, orientated person... yes, and it's not as if he was on drugs or had been drinking or whatever. he was just perfectly normal. yeah, it was very bizarre. i'd never heard a story like it before and it transpired that he was having little epileptic seizures arising in a part of his brain important to both memory and imagination, and those seizures were producing a hallucination. and it was the same one each time? yes, and that's a feature of brain

disease and seizures is that they tend to be stereotypes. you get the exact same thing every time. and that's where the clue, the biggest clue lay. i couldn't read this without thinking about, you know, second sight and apparitions and all the paranormal stuff that, you know, people can argue about until the cows come home. but in human history, you can sense how people who've had visions may simply have had the kinds of conditions that you are still, in the 21st—century, trying to understand. yes. well, there's nothing a neurologist likes more than to make retrospective diagnoses, going back hundreds or thousands of years. so we do love to blame apparitions. i mean, many people have tried to attribute joan of arc‘s experience to hallucinations related to epilepsy. lewis carroll is said to possibly have suffered with epilepsy, and certainly had migraine. and there is a syndrome called alice in wonderland syndrome which is attributed to his epilepsy. and you think that maybe,

the kind of imagination that produced that extraordinary work may have come from activity in his brain which wasn't simply an intellectual working out of a story but something medical. well, people have a very unique experiences during epileptic seizures. and i once saw a journalist describe his feeling during a seizure as if he took the toy box of his brain, threw it in the air and it came down, and bits of lego had combined with a rubik's cube, so that he'd created something utterly new that he would never have thought of in any other state. so it's possible it has a creative influence. finally, it must be a wonderfully rewarding field of medicine to be in, not simply because you're dealing with people at a very high level in terms of their experience, but you're also discovering something new everyday. yes, i still see things every week that i never thought i would see and that are astonishing to me, and i work with patients who overcome things i never thought i would encounter, so it's astonishing all the time.

suzanne o'sullivan, author of brainstorm: detective stories from the world of neurology. thank you very much. thank you. it is pretty fair to say it has been an miserable april so far, but things are set to warm up this week. we could see house of 25 degrees, 77 fahrenheit, in the south—east. there will be widespread warmth across the country, in the high teens and 20s. today, the sun chang has been fairly isolated. beautiful in the far north. for most of us, quite a cloudy day and have been outbreaks of brain. the rain will continue to push its way steadily north and east

overnight tonight, taking that wetter weather into northern ireland, north—west england and parts of scotland. not quite as cold as the nightjust passed. further south you will see the rain starting to ease away and temperatures quite like —— quite widely on monday morning between five and 9 degrees. on the start in a relatively quiet note. hopefully the cloud will break up note. hopefully the cloud will break up from time to time to allow some sunny spells. the rainbow he's in scotland. by the end of the afternoon the winds will increase and some wet weather will push into northern ireland. as we move out of monday, the winds will continue to strengthen, gusting to gale force in northern ireland, north—west england and scotland. there will be rain, some of that heavy at times, to start on tuesday. as this front pushes its way south it will weaken. to the north, highs of ia. pushes its way south it will weaken. to the north, highs of 1a. in the

south and east of england we could see house of 19 degrees. in the sunshine that will start to feel pleasant. by the middle of the week we start to see an influence of high pressure in the continent and the south easterly flow, which will drag in the warmerair, south easterly flow, which will drag in the warmer air, something we have not seen for quite some time. lots of sunshine in the south and east. outbreaks of brain will move further north. perhaps between iii outbreaks of brain will move further north. perhaps between ia and 16 north. perhaps between 1a and 16 degrees in scotland and northern ireland, highest values and to stay of 23. on thursday, fairweather cloud to the west, but a fine day. light winds, lots of sunshine. the highest values possibly of 25 celsius, or 77 fahrenheit. this is bbc news. the headlines at 11: the prime minister is expected to call an emergency debate in parliament on syria as the government says no further action is planned. the targets, suspected

chemical weapons sites, but the bombing is being questioned by opposition parties. ican i can only countenance this involvement in syria if there is un authority behind it. the overwhelming reason why this was the right thing to do is because it deters the use of chemical weapons, notjust by the deters the use of chemical weapons, not just by the assad deters the use of chemical weapons, notjust by the assad regime, but around the world. one week on from the alleged chemical attack, we speak to one