Could technology improve our brains?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What comes to mind when you imagine the future of humanity? Could a computer make your mind more efficient? Enhance your cognition? Or cure a disorder you've been grappling with all your life? CrowdScience listener Mariana from Mexico hopes that one day technology will be able to help improve our brains. 

Presenter Alex Lathbridge seeks out some of these brain boosters, exploring emerging technologies in deep brain stimulation at City St George’s University of London in the UK. Professor Francesca Morgante and Dr Lucia Ricciard explain how they’re using technology to treat Parkinson’s.

And could brain technology help with even the most enigmatic elements of our minds? Dr Robert Hampson at Wake Forest University in the USA takes us through his research in restoring memory impairment.  

Along the way we interrogate the ethical implications of the breakneck speed of progress in brain augmentation research with researcher Anders Sandberg from the Institute of Future Studies in Sweden.   

Presenter: Alex Lathbridge  Producer: Emily Bird  Series Producer: Ben Motley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Sing Sing and I'm Simon Jack. And Good Bad Billionaire is back. It's the podcast
0:06.2	exploring the lives and livelihoods of some of the world's richest people, but this time there's
0:10.6	a twist. On Good Bad Dead billionaire, we are looking back on the lives of some titans of
0:15.6	US industry. Like the first ever billionaire, John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Ford
0:20.3	Motor Company, Henry Ford,
0:21.9	and the First Lady of Wall Street, Hetty Green.
0:24.3	And Simon and I are asking you if they were good, bad or just another billionaire.
0:28.4	Good bad billionaire. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	Eggs. Eggs.
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0:37.1	Coffee. Coffee. Tea. Tea. Cake. Coffee.
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0:41.1	Butter.
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0:43.0	Corn.
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0:45.2	Salt.
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0:48.2	Okay.
	...

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