All in the Mind 10th Anniversary Special 4: Brave New Brain
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Why is the 10th anniversary of All in the Mind significant for brain‑technology discussions?
Well, we're well and truly into the second decade of the second millennium. And all in the mind is turning ten. Natasha Mitchell with you. As I have been since two thousand and two when we kicked off the show and on ABC Radio National Summer we've been digging into our rich archives for you. And look, the head is such an interesting play space for a science journalist. And over the last decade we've tracked all sorts of technologies that look set to redefine the self and what we're capable of. Technologies like brain machine interfaces. Um neuroprosthetics for people who are paralyzed, intelligent robots going to war, bionic eyes. And the prospects of stem cell therapy for diseases like Parkinson's and so much more.
And especially we've tracked the ethical dimensions of these endeavours. That's been a big focus of the show. So today's adventure into the archive, we're augmenting ourselves. It's the brave new brain. Back in 2003 on the show, the prospect of bionic brains and a silicon memory implant was on our minds with philosopher of neuroscience Carl Craver.
They tried to reprogram his mind and something went wrong.
We're used to thinking of prosthetics as replacements for the tools with which we carry out our will. So we think of prosthetics as uh replacements for arms or replacements for eyes or replacements for ears. But we're not used to thinking of replacements for the very things that would have desires, the very things that would make decisions about our futures, the very things that shape our conception of who we are and so shape how we will act in the future.
Philosopher Carl Craver considering prosthetic replacements for when things go wrong inside your head is This month, researchers in the vanguard of neuroscience gathered for the first international conference on neural engineering in Italy. What caught the attention of the world's journalists was a presentation given by a leading biomedical engineer who hopes to wire up human brains with a silicon interface even in the next decade or so. World's first brain prosthesis screamed. The headlines. Theodore Berger and his team at the University of Southern California report that they've developed a prototype artificial hippocampus. That's the part of the brain involved in the storage of information as memories and so crucial then to who we are.
Conditions like Alzheimer's, epilepsy, or a stroke can damage the hippocampus, and more on that later. But the research team's ultimate goal is
to develop a neural prosthetic for the central nervous system to replace higher thought processes that have been lost due to damage. A neural prosthetic designed to replace damaged neurons in central regions of the brain with silicon neurons. Memory is at the heart of our personality and the prospect of replacing the hippocampus with an electrical implant moves from prosthesis as tool to prosthesis as decision maker. That raises a whole host of questions that I don't think that we have adequately grappled with yet.
Yeah, y the bioethicist Arthur Kaplan, who's fairly optimistic about uh the brain revolution, he suggests that we're a little puritanical about the idea of mucking with our heads. And I mean this taps into this concern that you've expressed.
Right. I one thing that that I should do to temper my concern about this is to simply point out that we tend to think of cognition as something that happens inside our skulls or at least inside our skins. But it's important to keep in mind that a lot of what we would call cognitive activity involves tools in our environment. We already count on our fingers and do math on paper. We remember things by writing them down in our day planners. We drive to a new city by following the road signs along the way. And all of those things are ways of using our environment is what Andy Clark called scaffolding for thinking. And so there's a real question about what difference there is between those kinds of environmental scaffolding and the kind of scaffolding that uh Berger's advance forces us to think about.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is the 10th anniversary of All in the Mind significant for brain‑technology discussions?
0:00–4:25
2
How could a silicon‑based artificial hippocampus change memory and identity?
4:25–7:27
3
What does the ‘extended mind’ theory suggest about tools becoming part of our cognition?
7:27–10:36
4
How are researchers designing bionic eyes to restore vision in degenerative eye disease?
10:36–13:36
5
What ethical questions arise from creating human‑non‑human brain chimeras?
13:36–16:59
6
How do stem‑cell‑derived neural prostheses raise safety and efficacy concerns for human trials?
16:59–21:35
7
What breakthroughs were highlighted at the International Conference on Neural Engineering?
21:35–25:53
8
Will future brain‑augmentation technologies blur the line between human and machine?
25:53–29:28