A Deep Foundation
Every day I thank God, my family, and those who have stuck by me, as well as those who have challenged me, for the privilege of new beginnings. Each time I’ve started a new job or a new relationship, I approach it from a clear vantage, because I seek to enter domains I know least about, but which are the most interesting to me. This has become a cycle in my life, and with each revolution my vantage grows taller, and my vision grows keener, so I can see the interworkings of Nature more wholly and the intricacies of human beings more sharply.
For the longest time I could not figure out what it was for, my routine breaking down of the scaffolding I had so carefully assembled. In hindsight the reason is apparent. I had already stood on solid ground again, and the scaffolding that had allowed me to build up the earth under my feet no longer served any purpose, except for its own sake.
Reading the Shadows on the Wall
By my mid-20s I had already experienced a number of such cycles. Then, after a big tech layoff in the wake of global financial catastrophe that threatened “world orders,” I began looking up. Above everything, all the layers of matter and law and religion, I saw only mind. My own mind was the wall I could not penetrate, and against it appeared shadows of the familiar forms that I knew belonged to the minds of people and social animals around me. The mind is the basis and origin of all experience, and Nature (or God, if you like) is mirrored against it, like the shadows of the truth in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The pursuit of understanding in service of the human mind was the highest good I could conceive of, so I decided to focus my efforts more carefully going forward. I had built breadth of understanding across domains from literature to finance and programming, but I wanted to specialize, to go deep.
A few months later I found myself having talked my way into a seat in a neuroscience lab at Dartmouth’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Broad training in neuroimaging, bioengineering, and institutional research apparatus was fine-tuned with neural data analysis and human intracranial electrophysiology. Most people in my position would have continued on until they received the piece of paper that lets them call themselves doctor. Truthfully I thought I would end up doing the same.
Puncturing the Dura
That’s when the wall of my own mind was smashed through, and I could see light on the other side. My partner, a colleague who had become a loved one, left the world one night at the end of spring, just as the cherry blossoms had begun to fall in New England. The last time we spoke she had told me she was going home. She had made me promise I would not stay in the lab after she went. At the time, I had agreed, but I hadn’t been so sincere. She must have known my ambitions would have been stifled in a life of structured academia. After all, she was in a way my honorary ‘cofounder’ of the shell of the company I was just beginning to conceive. I used to spend some weekends and evenings thinking up names and logos for the future company, and she had often been there as boundless encouragement, a curatorial mind, indeed my muse. After her death I felt that she had pierced a hole in the veil to heaven and that her soul must have ascended in a pillar of light from the river to diffuse amid the constellations. She gave me a glimpse into the other side. There was no way back.
In the weeks of lying idle, sick from hurt, I picked through a stack of photos left behind for me. The slogan on the sleeve of drugstore prints spoke to me in a way I never thought a cliche branding campaign could. The bold-font letters burst from their crimson backdrop as my neurons thundered from overwhelmed capillaries.
“Make every moment a memory.”
The message seemed clear to me, and it didn’t have anything to do with pictures. It was simultaneously a statement about the tragedy in the fallibility of the human mind and a mandate to create things that enhance connection between people, and maybe even lessen their suffering.
Carrying Out a Calling
I had spent weekends throughout my time at Dartmouth beginning my self-education in electrical engineering, because I had been interested in brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Breakthroughs like the Utah Array, Neuropixels, and Neuralink N1 are fascinating devices that depend on much the same types of direct brain signals I analyzed in the lab. However, these futuristic technologies require at minimum an entry hole bored through the patient’s skull. They are surgical devices. The future I want to live in does not consist of superfluous surgeries, so devices like these could never comprise a platform for general utility and mass adoption, which are necessary conditions to bring about a paradigm shift toward general-purpose neural interfaces.
Nonsurgical BCI is a platform that will fundamentally change the way people interact with technology. First came the computer, and then the smartphone, and currently we are experiencing AI revolutionizing the ease and speed with which we operate, learn from, or even are operated on by machines. The global preconditions are perfect for a new revolution in neural interfacing that builds on widespread computer literacy, mature mobile electronics manufacturing capabilities, and the democratization of information and acceleration of knowledge creation that AI and machine learning have enabled. Add to that recipe the century-old but very much still relevant technology of electroencephalography (EEG) enhanced by recent developments in biopotential sensor miniaturization and performance, and you have the perfect set of ingredients for a platform built from compact EEG wearables, which anybody can afford or assemble themselves and run with free software that pairs seamlessly to the devices they already use every day. I am building the company, IntoMind, Inc., that is baking this cake.
Epilogue: Building the Foundation of the Revolution
To help ensure the neural interface revolution is robustly supported, I am exploring standing up a foundation in parallel that will open-source, distribute, and educate the public about technologies like the “neurons to bits to action” platform IntoMind has built. My conception of the foundation evolved and expanded out of the technological innovation I achieved at IntoMind as I witnessed how my friend and former college roommate was building his own open astronomy foundation, Cosmic Frontier Labs. He helped me see how innovative industrial design coupled with benevolent vision can fundamentally eliminate barriers to scientific progress, especially where those barriers present as data bottlenecks enforced by cost-prohibitive or proprietized instrumentation. Open science is positive-sum, and Neuroscientific Labs is my proposal for holding the door open to a better future for humans everywhere. It is a future in which humans are in control, because the technology that makes their lives easier and healthier is synchronized to them, and not the other way around.
The blueprint of the foundation is designed to encourage participation in the nonsurgical neurotechnology sector, and I intend to explore partnerships with companies who have strengths in areas where IntoMind is not as developed. Of course, IntoMind will do its part where its own strengths reside: creating accessible and highly performant hardware and software technologies. The revolution is coming, and it will require cooperation as well as productive competition between many companies, institutions, and individuals. It starts with the hardware, open, buildable and affordable enough to become ubiquitous, so that high-quality brain data from everyday life becomes abundant and free to access. Data will feed the flywheel that produces greater advances in hardware and applications that in turn improve the lives of people everywhere, and maybe even lessen their suffering.