BRAIN STREAM

Join Colin and Harrison on our first ever podcast episode! Brain Stream will cover a wide range of topics in Neurotechnology, ranging from ethics to cutting edge technology. Join us as we explore a wide range of topics and discuss the future of the field! Future episodes will feature prominent figures in the Neurotechnology field.

This week we spoke to Dr. Stephen Grossberg, who is the author of the book Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How the brain makes a mind (which you can purchase here: https://amzn.to/3ni34sS). Dr. Grossberg is widely regarded as an important founding member of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and neuromorphic technology. His work has focused on developing theories and supporting equations that can predict and understand the mechanisms behind learning, memory, and behaviors. He received his Bachelor's Degree at Dartmouth University in mathematics and psychology. He then went on to receive his Masters at Stanford and his PhD at the Rockefeller University which were both in mathematics. 

Dr. Nicolas Vachicouras is the Founder and CEO of NeuroSoft Bioelectronics, a neurotechnology company developing, in their words, the next generation of soft implantable electrodes to interface seamlessly with the nervous system. He received his bachelors of science in micro engineering in 2012, his Master of science in microengineering with a minor in biomedical engineering in 2014, and his Ph.D. in stretchable CNS neural interfaces in 2019 all from EPFL in English known as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. 

This week we spoke to Nathan Copeland, an individual who has received a Blackrock brain-computer interface implant in both his somatosensory cortex and motor cortex. Nathan is an invasive brain-computer interface user and neurotechnology consultant. In 2004, he was in a car accident that left him with a C5 spinal cord injury and resulting quadriplegia. He later joined the Rehab Neural Engineering Lab at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to test brain-computer interface devices to control a robotic arm, an exoskeleton glove, play video games, and make art. His work over the last 7 years has resulted in major contributions to science. Currently, Nathan is working as a neurotechnology consultant for Blackrock Neurotech and, on his own time, has started making and selling NFTs on OpenSea drawn entirely with his brain-computer interface! 

We spoke to Garret Flynn & Joshua Brewster from Brains@Play on the importance of developing open-source brain sensing tools that work across different devices. Brains@Play is developing open-source (AGPLv3) brain and biomedical sensing tools with modern web technologies and low-cost IoT hardware. Brains@Play are helping pave the way for future community-led health technologies, and we’re so excited to have had this time to chat with them!

This week on the Brain Stream we spoke to Vlad Samoilov & Philipp Zent from Brainamics. Brainamics is a neurotech startup from the Technical University of Munich. They make a unique technology framework that enables the extraction of emotions directly from the human brain. To do that, Brainamics uses Electroencephalograms (EEG) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms The commercial starting point was the gaming industry, where game developers use the insights into the psychology and user experience of their gamers to optimize their gameplay. 

The vision of Brainamics however reaches way beyond that. With the existing emotion extraction technology, many more digital entertainment use cases can be exploited and thanks to the multimodal biometric data that is collected along the way, Brainamics will be able to develop further groundbreaking technologies in the space of neurotechnology.

In this episode, we spoke with James Johnson about his experience of using an implantable brain-computer interface as a participant in cutting-edge neurotech research and about life after a spinal cord injury. 

James is a truly extraordinary person. As you'll learn, from the time he put his life on the line while volunteering as a young boy, through his career as a medical professional, James has led a life of service and compassion for his community. 

So much so that even after being paralyzed from a paramotor accident in 2017, he still sought out things he could do to help others. That's why he jumped at the chance to participate in BCI research even though it required him to get multiple brain surgeries. Using his device, he's been able to make art, use a computer, play video games, and even drive a vehicle. He hopes that his participation and hard work will pave the way for medical BCIs to go into production so that others with spinal cord injuries will get access to these amazing technologies.