Main content

Super-sensing Ben

Professor Ben Garrod plays with the wearable tech helping track to our health and meets pioneers of brain implants. Could all this technology help us learn more about ourselves?

We've been building computers to think like us for years, but our ability to replicate human senses has been impossible. Until now. This technological revolution is starting to profoundly change not only how we interact with the world around us, but is allowing us to see, hear, smell, taste and even touch things we never imagined possible before.

An artificial intelligence revolution is super-charging sensing technology, promising us eyes with laser precision, ears that can distinguish every sound in a mile's radius and noses than can sniff out the early signs of forest fires before the first flame forms.

Evolutionary biologist and broadcaster Professor Ben Garrod, is off to meet some of these sensory innovators and technological pioneers. The brain surgeons, bio-ethicists and psychologists who are turning our world upside down and inside out.

In episode five, we take the jump from virtual reality into augmented reality. We meet a man whose VR experience takes us inside a ducks vagina. And a company whose VR experiences have won prizes at major film festivals. We play with the health monitors which could just make us fitter, happier and more productive humans in the future. We meet a neuroscientist behind the first medically approved brain implants. And we meet a technologist who says he might be able to give people back lost senses.

Could these new technologies and natural evolutions be redefining what it is to be human? Ben takes us through the amazing adaptations, and technological developments that could help stretch us become all-sensing superhumans with possibly even more than five senses.

Presenter: Professor Ben Garrod
Producer: Robbie Wojciechowski

Series exec: Alex Mansfield
Development producer: Melanie Brown

Available now

28 minutes

Last on

Mon 22 May 2023 21:00

Broadcasts

  • Tue 16 May 2023 11:00
  • Mon 22 May 2023 21:00