Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.
I'm actually an engineer.
I can tell you what images are in your head. I can tell what music you're thinking of. I can tell if you're listening to me or not. That's possible with an MRI now.
If we could communicate at the speed of thought, we can augment our creativity with the low-level stuff that AI and robots and 3-D printers and fab labs and all that do.
If I throw you into an MRI machine right now, I can tell you what words you're about to say.
I figured out how to put basically the functionality of an M.R.I. machine - a multimillion-dollar M.R.I. machine - into a wearable in the form of a ski hat.
Elon Musk is talking about silicon nanoparticles pulsing through our veins to make us sort of semi-cyborg computers. But why not take a noninvasive approach? I've been working and trying to think and invent a way to do this for a number of years and finally happened upon it and left Facebook to do it.
I think that's the point of what we all should all be doing: trying to make the impossible possible.
My system uses the speed of components in cameras and cell phones to get four inches of depth through the brain.
It's exciting to be able to be part of the block and tackle of building a company from a smaller base.
You see very senior women leaving technology and the men stay, mostly because they feel quite isolated and are isolated by the very systems.
My central thesis is that combining increased temporal and spatial resolution in MRI techniques with increasingly powerful data correlation techniques will allow the derivation of interpreted meanings from neural signals. I observed, further, that the techniques that exist already allow some correlations.
In my early 30s, for a few months, I altered my body chemistry and hormones so that I was closer to a man in his early 20s. I was blown away by how dramatically my thoughts changed.
I worked as an artist, played in a band, met Andy Warhol, Christo, Lou Reed, and David Byrne. I had fun.
Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they 'studied' my design.
The world's information is digital. The web, the news, all of that is digital. And now... we have ten million books scanned. That was the last bastion of what was offline; it's now online and accessible.
I've found that people who design computers don't know a lot about displays.
If you can make a lot more of something, you can make it much more inexpensive.
The future of reading is screens. Books are toast.
I didn't want to be an electrical engineer. But I did want to go to college. And they said they'd help me pay for it if I'd major in electrical engineering.
