We humans have a natural curiosity to explore and discover.
Outer space is seemingly this final frontier.
The human mind, the world inside of our head
is just as complex as the world outside of it.
What we're doing at Open BCI is establishing a set of tools to allow other individuals
to embark on this journey inward.
We're just at the beginning. This is the beginning of a neuro-revolution.
So at the end of my undergrad, I played rugby.
And I had suffered a traumatic brain concussion.
And I felt my mind change.
I got this first exposure, this first dose of how fragile your brain is.
And the fact that you can damage the hardware and the software is influenced.
While I was taking my first physical computing class,
I discovered how to hack a Mattel Mindflex
that could measure both brain and muscle activity from your forehead.
I was able to extract meaningful data from my brain.
And begin to quantify what I always thought was qualitative.
I definitely identified that moment in time being a turning point in my life.
And it was the beginning of my trajectory into the space.
Sorry the dog is snoring. Is that ok?
Is it too much?
Hey Sash...hey Sash. Come on.
So Joel was definitely one my favorite teachers.
Joel's a very interesting person. In a great way.
I'm sort of a autodidact, because I say yes to everything.
I am the kind of teacher that will teach you a skill.
He was one of the few teachers that I had that
I didn't understand everything that he was teaching me.
His approach to teaching was like, if you can't keep up then this class isn't for you.
Lickety-split, we like to say.
So when he reached out to me to work with him on OpenBCI, I was like definitely.
Because there's still a lot that I have to learn from this guy.
OpenBCI is an open source hardware company, and we make hardware that is used to
collect, measure, and record brain waves.
Your brain is an ocean of electricity and what we do is we look at those waves
and we try and make sense of them.
BCI stands for brain computer interface.
It's anything that is a bridge or an interface or a connection between your brain and a computer.
So this would imply that you would use a technique like EEG, which stand for electroencephalogram.
The measurement of electrical activity from activity from the scalp.
And then use those signals to control a machine, whether it's a computer or a robot or a prosthetic.
Joel had a prototype. We took it to Maker Fair.
Our booth was packed. Absolutely packed.
Everyone at Maker Faire was like, what? What is this thing?
Those are brain waves? Is this real?
I'm like yeah it's not magic. It's science.
And that was the moment when we realized, we should probably launch a Kickstarter.
Our initial goal for the Kickstarter was $100K and we got $215K.
So we make a number of products.
We make something called the Ultracortex.
Which is a 3D-printed electrode headset.
By open sourcing what we're doing, providing all the schematics, providing the design files,
it helps innovation increase in velocity.
A great reference that we have is the lego model.
If we can create all of these subcomponents
and say, you're the creative one, figure out how to make this better.
Let people apply their expertise and their skill sets to build real things that are interesting.
Our community, I think, is our strongest leg in our stool.
We are appealing to both high school students and scientists at NASA.
A neuroscientist is only going to ask the questions that a neuroscientist would ask.
It won't ask some crazy, whacked-out question.
But those kinds of questions might be the ones that lead you to some crazy discovery.
What does it take to understand what these things mean?
So if I grip my jaw, that's a huge muscle artifact that goes across the whole system.
So now we're in the presentation.
I can go through the slides just using microexpressions.
So if I go, left eye, right eye, I go forward a slide.
And then if I'm done with my presentation, one, two, three, and I'm back out.
Technologies like OpenBCI, companies like us, we have both the ability and the responsibility
to be applying our tools to people in need.
I recently spoke with a representative of the ALS Foundation,
and I was told that 90% of ALS patients have motor control.
They can move muscles.
And what that means is we can tap into a muscle group that produces a very reliable signal
and use that as essentially a new keyboard or a new joystick for controlling a wheelchair
or moving a cursor on a screen or clicking a button.
The goal is to have it help keep abilities even as the body is deteriorating.
Out of tens of thousands of people with ALS or similar motor degenerative diseases
around the world, maybe a few dozen have access to technology like this.
So we're talking about a massive population of people
who are living with the inability to communicate with loved ones.
We can already help them.
People fear the future of technology, especially when we're talking about sticking electrodes
in our head and creating a bridge between our consciousness and computers.
We need to be very careful about what we design
and ensure that we're doing it for the right reasons.
A big reason we do what we do is to inspire the next generation,
people that are going to really build the cool stuff.
The stuff that we can think of right now but we don't actually have the capability to create.
Four years ago I was able to go and figure out BCI because of some hack online
and now I'm hoping to work with an ALS patient.
BCI gives this amazing opportunity we have to build a better relationship with our brain.
One thing that humanity has always been good at,
and that's why we are where we are as a species, is pushing the limits.
If there's something that we don't understand, it frustrates us,
and we need to figure that out.
We are everyday evolving.
And ten years from now, we will be a different species.
We'll still be humans, but we'll be different humans than we are today.