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From alchemy to brain-hacking: How to be better, forever

Anders Sandberg tackles transhumanism for the rest of us

Reg Lectures It’s the time of year where we stop to think about how we could make ourselves better people. Well, if you spare around 50 minutes of your time to watch our first 2015 Reg Winter Lecture vid, you’ll find out how to be better not just next year, but for centuries.

At least that’s the possibility if Anders Sandberg, of the Future of Humanity institute at Oxford, is correct about the possibilities of taking control of our own evolution. And you can watch the whole video right here.

Anders took us on a dizzying 50-minute tour of transhumanism and human enhancement, covering why today’s chimpanzees are confused about their place in the world, why snakes are immortal but humans hanker after the afterlife, why the euro would be in better shape if the Eurocrats had bowls of drugs at the next emergency summit, and how some of his friends are experimenting with do-it-yourself brainhacking. And lots more besides.

Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to meet one of the lizard people, Anders will tell you.

Sadly, you won’t get the hour’s worth of Q&A that followed, or the high level chat that always breaks out when you squeeze a few dozen highly intelligent Reg readers into a room with a bar. For that, you need to turn up in the flesh at our next series of lectures.

And if you want to find out when they’re happening almost as soon as we do, you should really consider signing up for a Reg account here.

Videos of our talks from TRL's driverless car guru Nick Reed and SQL programmer and Iraq hostage Peter Moore will appear next week. Stay tuned. ®

Think you're up giving to a Register lecture? Get in touch with us here.

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