December 23, 2025

Rita Leggett suffers from epilepsy. When she becomes a cyborg, she speaks of liberation. For the first time, she can be who she really is. But the transformation has side effects. It changes Rita far more than we have ever seen with technology before. What questions arise from these still-young technologies, some of which offer life-changing benefits for patients?
In the Deutschlandfunk podcast „Die Psychonauten“ (The Psychonauts), Anneke Meyer and Arndt Reuning talk to Prof. Marcello Ienca from the TUM Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine about the potential and dangers of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and the challenges this poses for politics and society. „We need a kind of AI/BCI Act, i.e., a legal basis on which this process can be controlled,“ say the two journalists. Prof. Ienca has contributed to drafts of precisely such a regulation in an advisory capacity to both the European Commission and UNESCO, and presents some of the research results from his projects in the podcast.

The entire podcast to listen to again here