Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions

I was able to sit down and talk with Pasha Takmakov during SfN after seeing his poster on accelerated neural interface testing. He talks about the research where he could simulate years of degradation in only a week. This could one day speed up the iteration cycles of electrode designs leading to better designs.  This recording had a bit of clicking which I tried to minimize.

It was really fun to talk to Greg Gage during SfN in November 2017. During our interview, he demonstrated some of the new neural educational toys from Backyard Brains. We were able to read neural activity, send that neural activity into his arm, and finally send his into my arm. I didn't like the last one, it worked but it felt like electricity in my arm. Regardless, the work they are doing to tea...

It was a pleasure to talk with Danny McDonnell of Ripple Neuro which is also based in Utah. In this episode we talk about the beginnings of the company and growing organically. He talks about some of the advantages of some new experimental experimentation such as being able to upload your own code and having the data acquisition system be portable. I had trouble with the audio in this file. I was...

I think one of my favorite posters during SfN was with Theo Zanos and the work at the Feinstein Institute involving the vagus nerve. They were able to read insulin, glucose, and cytokyne signals going from the body to the brain. This is the first step in bioelectronic medicine, being able to read and write the information coming from the body. In this interview, we talk about the specifics in bein...

It was an honor to meet with Ian Burkhart after hearing so much about him. This show has had at least a half-dozen researchers that had published papers based on his implanted array. Ian is a quadriplegic patient that volunteered to have a Utah Electrode array implanted in his brain so that he could move his fingers. Now it has been implanted in his brain for almost 4 years and it is still doing f...

Dr Joern Rickert is the CEO of Cortec and I had a chance to sit down to talk with him during the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in November 2017. In this episode we talk about a bit of what SfN is like and then we continue on to Coretec's technology. Their goal is to make the human brain connectable to Artificial intelligence. They specialize in making soft electrodes and even have made electrodes...

I love Isaac Arthur's Science and Futurism Youtube channe l and podcast . So when he covered the topic of Mind Augmentation I asked him if I could share the show on this channel as well. It is a bit different than what this podcast usually is about since it deals with the more science fiction possibilities 100 years in advance. Nonetheless, I think it is very interesting and I had never heard some...

Matt Angle is the CEO of Paradromics which aims to make broadband for the brain possible, massively parallel brain interfaces and realtime decoding. They use off the shelf electrode wires which were previously ignored to cheaply create a neural interface that can have 50,000 channels. With a recent $18 million DARPA grant they are poised to start selling implants soon. In this episode we not only...

I had a great time at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC and it was great to hear that the podcast is so well received!  "You came out of nowhere but are doing a great job!" Was the general sentiment from many talks with fans of the podcast Straight from DC I went to Mumbai India and I will be travelling here for the next 6-8 months. Therefore my podcasts will be released on...

Dr David Friedenberg works at Batelle which is an interesting company with a kind of profit/nonprofit model. In this episode we talk about some software and hardware changes they made in order for a patient to have gradual muscle control. That way if the patient wanted to grip an egg he would be able to do more than simply crush the egg or to drop it.

We were able to have this interview in person at the Human Brain Project Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. It was the first of my in person video interviews I hope to make and it was a new medium. You can watch the video here   In this interview Dr Mitra talked about his previous work with electronically selectable neural probes. These probes had about 1500 electrodes which could be turned on or of...

Dr Kevin Otto is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida where he maps the neural networks of central and autonomous neurons. There he realized that the body's rejection of these implants is a huge issue and has been working on ways to allow the body to accept the implants for the long term.

James Giordano PhD, MPhil., is Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biochemistry, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, and Co-director of the O'Neill-Pellegrino Program in Brain Science and Global Health Law and Policy at the Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC. As well, he is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Brain Sc...

Dr Harbi Sohal is a rising star in the field of Neural Implants. He recently won the Forbes 30 under 30 for scientists. At 29, he has also recently become an Assistant Professor at the Feinstein Institute in New York. He has worked with previous guests Dr Andrew Jackson and Dr Ed Boyden and is now working with Dr Chad Bouton. He is working on all the big things in this field: Glial scarring reduct...

Dr Douglas Weber has recently come back from a program manager position at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which lasted 4 years. Now he is back to being an associate professor at University of Pittsburgh where he works with haptics in neuroprosthetics. By giving feedback from pressures back into the body the patient does not have 'phantom limb' pain. He is also interested in Elec...

Dr Bradley Greger is an associate professor at Arizona State University where he is interested in helping the blind see. The blind person would have implants which go directly to the brain, similar to a Cochlear Implant, which would transmit what a camera saw. In this way vision could be restored, even it if is only 7 x 7 pixel vision.

Dr. Slawomir Nasuto is a professor of Cybernetics and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Reading in England. He researches computational neuroscience and neuroanatomy. However, in this interview, we were both in a philosophical mood and talked about how to avoid blind spots in experiments. Any experiments in the brain inherently produce research biases of the experimenters and we talk abo...

Dr. Edward Boyden has co-invented optogenetic tools which allow control of neurons using light. This discovery has won him a prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences which came with $3 million dollars (and he promised to donate $1 million to the Neural Implant podcast!). He also has worked on expansion microscopy which 'freezes' the biomolecules and expands them up to 100x. In this way it is...

Dr Tim Marzullo is the Cofounder of Backyard Brains which uses simple (and cheap) technology to demonstrate neuronal activity to those without labs. It's aimed at high schools and Universities to show kids how brain activity works to hopefully spark their interest. We talk about the difficulties in doing a startup but the aid that grants can have along the way.   Be sure to check out their TED tal...

Dr Steve Potter used to be a professor at Georgia Tech but now consults. But many years ago he was a pioneer in the field of Brain Machine Interfaces especially in the area of cultured neurons. He was one of the proponents of the Two Photon Microscopy system which is in common use today. He is also a huge proponent of open source knowledge and works hard to spread it far.

Dr Ioan Opris along with previous guest Dr Mikhail Lebedev as well as Dr Casanova had won a $100k grant to have a conference in Switzerland in 2018. This was from the Frontiers Spotlight award. We also talk about his work with memory implants in which choices and memories can  be transmitted between animals. They were able to get decision making up from about 50% chance to 70% and 80% using these...

Dr Ranu Jung  is a professor and chair of Biomedical Engineering in Florida International University and recently was FDA approved for an investigational neural-enabled prosthetic device system. We also talk about the future of bioelectronic medicines and she will be on the editorial board of the upcoming Bioelectronics in Medicine journal.

Dr Cristin Welle is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado where they work on a tattoo-like EEG which can help measure whether or not a concussion has occurred. In this way, in sports or battlefield situations you can measure it and see whether you need to treat the patient. We also talk about some of the basics in Neural Implants so this is a nice refresher course for this field.

Dr Mikhail Lebedev  is a Senior Research Scientist at Duke University where he has worked with prosthetics and Brain Machine Interfaces in primates. Even 15 years ago he was able to demonstrate a primate controlling a robotic arm with minimal effort using only its thoughts. Now they do a little bit more 'sci-fi' experiments where they link up many brains to help solve problems together using telep...

Dr. Manfred Franke comes on again to explain some of the pros and cons to different educational approaches. We then talk about what we couldn't talk about last time: the approval of his neurostimulator device through the FDA. This device naturally stimulates a tear response in the eyes instead of adding artificial solutions. The device was approved by the FDA in about 4 years which suggests that t...