Translator: Liliane Tambasco Reviewer: Claudia Sander
(Portuguese) Wow! What a great event!
(Portuguese) I would like to speak Portuguese better,
but to express myself, I have to speak in English.
I'm here to share a dream.
I'm betting my career on the belief
that neuroscience will bring the next big wave of technology.
But for us to get there,
we have to accelerate the rate of technological progress.
And the core idea to that is exactly what bring us here today.
(Portuguese) "We are humanity" is what bring us here,
and what I want to say is we can all be neuroscientists.
So, I'm going to start with this story.
I'm sitting at a table in a mountain lodge in Montana.
And on the left is a technical founder
of a technology company that is now public,
and on my right is a partner of a famous global design firm.
And the night is getting late,
and the engineer says, "Hey, I've got a riddle."
And the riddle is something like, "We have four people at a restaurant
and they paid for dinner and the waitress comes back
and there is an extra dollar" - it's a math problem.
I'm about to answer, and the designer comes in
and he said, "That's a good one.
And while I think about it, I've got one for you:
You know, traffic lights? Red, yellow, green.
Is the green light on the top or on the bottom?"
And they couldn't get it!
And the idea of that story is that all our minds are different.
And our minds can work together,
but when we think about large-scale technology,
we think about people on "four buckets."
And (Portuguese) "We are humanity" - we can all be neuroscientists.
At the end of this talk, I want us to think that we can all -
we can break down these barriers and work together.
And as a designer, we like to talk in metaphor inspiration,
and this talk is big, it's about all we could know.
When you think about something big and hard, let's think about a metaphor,
and that is, everything we know can be contained inside a circle.
My dad told me this years ago.
And what you don't know is outside the circle,
what you do know is inside the circle.
And that perimeter is what you know you have to learn.
Well, this talk is about that perimeter.
And, specifically, we need to think bigger,
we need to think communities, we need to think systemically.
And when you think in communities the extension of that circle
is invention and inventory.
This idea came from Joshua Foer's book "Moonwalking with Einstein".
I love his point.
He said that invention and inventory come from the same Latin root, "inventio".
And we should look at invention as a product of inventory.
Now, this makes sense.
When you have the Lego pieces in your hand,
you can turn it into a spaceship, a train station, a dollhouse.
And what's beautiful about this model
is that all the invention becomes new inventory,
and then you can invent more.
And you can't talk about large scale innovation
without talking about the moon.
What does the moon look like in this model?
It looks like something like this.
Hundred eighty billion dollars,
400,000 people,
20,000 contracting companies to make this thing happen.
All working towards one single vision and that vision is that:
a foot on the moon.
It's so simple!
Is that repeatable? We'll find out.
But to contrast that, think about this,
"Hey, guys, I'm thinking about making this operating system.
I'm working on it but,
you can only use this kind of computer because that's all I have."
"What's Linux?"
And half of anything you do on the Internet
depends on a computer that runs Linux.
And so that model looks like this - it's distributed.
Tens of thousands of people have worked together
to create this product we all use.
And if you look at it,
the efficiency per person is pretty similar, if not better, than the moon.
So what does neuroscience look like?
To think about it, we have to think about what our inventory is right now.
So, I'm going to give you some examples,
I want you all to go home with the inventory of your mind
thinking about what neuroscience can be.
"The BrainGate" collaboration in the United States
made this amazing story -
this is a woman serving herself coffee for the first time in 15 years.
She can't move anything beneath her neck,
but they are reading signals from her motor cortex,
there's something in her head,
and she's able to control a robotic arm to serve herself coffee.
If you watch this YouTube video a little bit further,
you'll see the smile on her face,
and to me, that's just as meaningful as the footprint on the moon.
Similarly, we have a guy who walks a hundred stories on a device
that reads brain waves to move an artificial leg,
and he climbs a hundred floors on a building.
Not only are we beginning to read from the brain,
we are now being able to write to the brain.
This guy is feeling a handshake for the first time in years.
This is a brilliant work done by some scientists in Italy.
And we are also looking to ways to push more information
to change our brain.
So, this is a company called Brainsway, and they're using magnetic pulses
to affect the way our brains are working
and they are finding efficacy in helping with psychiatric disorders.
It doesn't all have to be big and fancy, this technology has been around for years,
but we're now getting better at processing the data.
And so this is some students at Graz University of Technology
and they are playing "World of Warcraft"
without moving a single part of their body.
So this is cool, but I want to get us to this question,
I'm not playing a game, I'm very serious,
"What if the barriers to neuroscience were not actually neuroscientific?"
Here is an example.
There's a website called Kaggle and they do algorithm competitions.
So they give you some data,
who can write the best math program to fix this or to get the best number?
So this is about Connectomics.
And they did this funny thing, they said, "Hey, click here for the data
and click here for a five-minute tutorial that has everything you need to know
about neuroscience, to start contributing to neuroscience."
Hold on, Connectomics is the fastest growing part of neuroscience.
Neuroscience itself is growing exponentially,
Connectomics is growing twice as fast as that.
What do you mean, you only need five minutes of a video
to tell you everything you need to know about neuroscience and start contributing?
But that's where we are.
Let me show you some more things about how this is going to change.
So, there is precedent for this.
The Human Genome Project - a big part of what unlocked the technology
was this algorithm called BLAST.
This single paper has 50,000 citations
and then another paper extended it pretty much directly
and had another 50,000 citations.
And it was computer science that unlocked a huge part of the Human Genome Project.
So, what is limiting us in neuroscience now?
Well, we have so much data coming.
This is a photo of a brain by some amazing scientists at Stanford.
Kwanghun Chung and Karl Deisseroth came up with a technology
called "CLARITY" and they can make tissue completely clear.
And with this, we now have gigabytes of data,
we're looking all the way through a brain to see how things connect.
Mitchell Ahrens and his collaborator Jeremy Freeman in Janelia Farm
have created this amazing technology where you can see every single neuron
firing in a fish brain.
Now, this is creating terabytes of data
per afternoon, per experiment.
And you can imagine that's only going to grow.
Paul Allen from Microsoft Fame has created something called the Allen Brain Atlas,
where he has taken 20,000 genes that we know are expressed in the brain
and he's put it all online for scientists to pull down
and experiment with.
And then, electron microscopy which has been around for years
is coming on with higher and higher data rates -
Hundred petabytes a year can be created
from a single machine taking this, and we're going all the way down
to see the tiny little pieces of vesicles that contain the brain information.
With all this data, we have to come back, we have to think.
We're now talking about data and software,
we are talking about digital tools.
They are not neuroscience.
And because we are now playing in this digital medium,
we have to recognize that new digital tools
have created new recipes for success.
But I'm saying this in an old way; this is Times New Roman, this is 1995.
Maybe this is new.
New digital tools, new recipes for success.
Or if you're a fan of Grumpy Cat, new recipes for success and joy.
Or if Hipster has come to Brazil,
then we'd have recipes for success by "The New Digital Tools."
And there is no better place to look at this from inspiration
than Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley has put billions of dollars
into experimenting with this
and figuring out how to create companies from technology.
Nobody will understand better than Silicon Valley
and this free-market model
of "some companies fail and some companies succeed".
They'll tell you better than anyone that the rate of innovation
is directly proportional to the rate of experimentation.
And they've learned what it means to hack.
This is the Facebook credo, "Move Fast and Break Things."
And they'll look at this and they'll say,
"We began to break down the barriers of this."
Some of the great companies were founded -
HP founded by engineers, Amazon founded by a business guy.
But over time, we are finding that the best teams are the ones
that have connections right from the beginning;
engineering and executive.
That's what we foresaw; I mean, my last company,
a business guy and a technical guy founded it.
We're also seeing great companies now that are built with designers first,
because people realized that designers are not a bolt-on,
designers are part of the process
by which you find who you want to touch and how.
Airbnb, founded by designers.
But now we're left with this piece in the middle, just science.
Why is science by itself? This is the future.
And a big person who is taking us there is Sebastian Seung,
Professor Sebastian Seung at MIT, now at Princeton.
And he, himself, was originally a physicist.
And then he went to Bell Labs,
he wrote seminal papers on machine learning,
and then he got into neuroscience.
And one day, he's looking at his data,
and he knows machine learning better than anybody.
And he says, "To do this we can find neurons in here.
We can extract full -
we can look at these slices and we can find how these cells connect.
And we need to know how these cells connect, to tell how the brain works.
But the best computer algorithms aren't going to get us there."
So he thought that we need to figure out a way
to augment human intelligence and machine intelligence,
to discover the new parts of the brain.
And so he created a game around this.
He created this new collaboration,
he brought on world-class designers, world-class engineers,
to create a product that got a 100,000 people
to go through this website and all be neuroscientists.
And the work is amazing,
and is now producing meaningful and incredible science.
And this is the kind of blend
that is going to be the future of neuroscience.
So let's bring it back to the circle.
This is the future of neuroscience.
This is the diagram.
We have the Brain Initiative in the United States
where our government is putting money into that.
And the European government is also putting a lot of money
in the Human Brain Project.
Both big and meaningful, and we need those initiatives.
But at the same time, we need to think about all the other people
that can now be involved.
So we think about this,
we think about something like this came from academia.
Well, we now have companies that are being built from the ground up
in brand new ways, solving the same problems.
So this is a company called OpenBCI, based in New York,
and they made a company that was put on Kickstarter,
doubled their goal, and they are so bold to say,
"We can create research-grade technology
at one tenth the cost of what's being built."
But what I like even more about the story is neither those guys are neuroscientists;
they're brilliant designers, they're engineers.
And they love neuroscience.
And because they've built something so good,
now academia is coming to them.
And artists are taking what they've built to extend that
and bring the idea of neuroscience-enabled technologies to the people.
This is an example.
This is me and my colleague, David Petrino,
we're working on our project to help a paralyzed artist paint again.
And we are using OpenBCI to do this.
And the same idea with the Brainsway technology,
saying we can use big magnets to change psychiatric disorders.
Entrepreneurs are taking a similar idea and they say,
"We can do big magnets or we can do small electrical currents
and let's put it straight into the market."
They've created a product that helps you play video games longer
by sending electrical pulses in your mind.
And I think, thinking systemically, we need companies like this.
Because this is protesting how much people care about neuroscience.
And at the same time, we have artists coming in
because our artists are often looked at as the earliest adopters of technology.
This is Mary Scahill, in New York, who created an exhibition
where people can see her brain waves on little crystals in front of her.
What's special about today is the Internet.
This is George Church,
who is a pivotal player in the Human Genome Project
and he said that Internet has played a huge role
in the Human Genome Project.
But when he talked about the Internet,
that was the Internet in 1993,
and this is the Internet now.
This is an amazing visualization of Stack Overflow
which is a question / answer format.
The idea is that these new tools, these new digital tools
create new recipes for success, create new ways of collaboration.
And at the same time we're looking at these huge top-down events,
like the Human Brain Project
and the Human [Genome] Project in the United States,
we also have the push to think what has come from the bottom up.
So, Cori Bargmann is a very respected neuroscientist,
who says, "Creative science is bottom-up."
And Ronnie Douglas said the same thing.
When he was looking at the European Human Brain Project,
he said, "We need variance in neuroscience."
And when they say this, I don't think they are imagining
just how important the maker community is to innovation in neuroscience.
So, creativity - creativity is so important.
Right out of "The Little Prince", there is this wonderful idea,
he said, "Once you see a rock pile and you see a cathedral on it,
it's no longer a rock pile."
And that idea is what is going to break down the walls
between these different sectors of people.
Because the only way we are going to innovate rapidly
is we are going to see us all as part of the same inventory.
And this is where neuroscience is going to go.
Once we're all together in this,
we can charge out on all these interesting directions.
And some areas need designers more than engineers,
some people need more science,
but this is where the future of neuroscience can go.
And I so deeply believe that if we can figure these ways
of taking these new digital tools and these new modes of collaboration,
that we're going to be able to start charging into the dark,
just like we charged the moon.
If you think about it, in the '60s, the whole country of the United States
was rallied around the idea of going to the moon.
Everyone stayed glued to their TV, thinking about the astronauts
but also those incredible people who were making those things possible.
We think of these mythical creatures who have these unbelievable intelligences
and these big blinking lights of million dollars
of equipment behind them.
But things are changing.
Because those millions of dollars of equipment behind them,
it now fits on your laptop.
And for a couple hundred dollars you can have your own -
rereading your brain waves.
And so if you get as excited as I do about what it took to go to the moon,
and if you can realize that we can pack all that into a computer,
and anyone of us can be neuroscientists,
then, you can think that this is the age when we can all be rocket scientists.
(Portuguese) Thank you.
(Applause)