内容摘要："It's something we do today in Photoshop relatively easily but in the late 1850s and mid-19th Century it was a pretty groundbreaking technique," said Dr Pritchard.

"It's something we do today in Photoshop relatively easily but in the late 1850s and mid-19th Century it was a pretty groundbreaking technique," said Dr Pritchard.

"Short-term speculating can backfire, even though there will be a temptation to hang on to the coat-tails of the record run upwards," is how Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, has put it."Investors considering investing in gold should do so as part of a diversified portfolio – they shouldn't put all their eggs in a golden basket."

I step into the booth with some trepidation. I am about to be subjected to strobe lighting while music plays – as part of a research project trying to understand what makes us truly human.It's an experience that brings to mind the test in the science fiction film Bladerunner, designed to distinguish humans from artificially created beings posing as humans.Could I be a robot from the future and not know it? Would I pass the test?

The researchers assure me that this is not actually what this experiment is about. The device that they call the "Dreamachine", after theof the same name, is designed to study how the human brain generates our conscious experiences of the world.

As the strobing begins, and even though my eyes are closed, I see swirling two-dimensional geometric patterns. It's like jumping into a kaleidoscope, with constantly shifting triangles, pentagons and octagons. The colours are vivid, intense and ever-changing: pinks, magentas and turquoise hues, glowing like neon lights.

The "Dreamachine" brings the brain's inner activity to the surface with flashing lights, aiming to explore how our thought processes work."Everything was filmed to present a fake image of prisoners with access to computers," Radalj said.

But, he claims, soon after the photo opportunity, the computers were wrapped up in plastic and never touched again.Throughout much of the ordeal, Radalj had been secretly keeping a journal by peeling open Covid masks and writing tiny sentences inside, with the help of some North Korean prisoners, who have also since been released.

"I would be writing, and the Koreans would say: 'No smaller… smaller!'."Radalj said many of the prisoners had no way of letting their families know they were in jail.