Humans seem to have reached Europe, Australia, India, and China all before they reached non-Mahgreb West Africa. And then they kept moving back and forth between all these places, especially from Eurasia to Africa. (This is all on shaky evi…
For the rare person who is searching for it: here is a scanned copy of the out-of-print Exploring the Mind-Brain Relationship, by Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath. I’m grateful to have received the blessing of Dr. Heath’s estate to post it here.
This is a guest post by Evelyn McLean In 1962 the British company Electrical & Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI) signed The Beatles to their label, making music history and ushering in an era of unprecedented success for any musical artist in h…
In the tradition of Cell Biology by the Numbers, Physiology by Numbers, and Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know, here’s a collection of numbers worth knowing if you’re working in neurotechnology. You can also download this list as
This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you weren’t, or didn’t even know you could. I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (es…
Thanks to AJ Kourabi for research assistance. Deep Brain Stimulators (source) Summary: ~40 years from demonstration in humans to consistent human use, including ~20 year pause to convince FDA. Summary: on the order of 50 years from demonstr…
Unfortunately, from a PR standpoint, neurotechnology doesn’t have a single, intuitive goal like climate tech, longevity research, or to a lesser extent artificial intelligence. Instead the state of neurotech is like the early days of person…
Treating depression with magnetic fields sounds, to most people first hearing about it, about as legitimate as treating depression with healing crystals. But in fact this technique, called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), is well-es…
People have been putting electricity through their heads for a very long time. The umbrella term for this is transcranial electrical stimulation (tES). Every discussion of tES must, by tradition, start with the anecdote that people in antiq…
Maybe as a legacy of the Manhattan Project, the field of physics is capable of large-scale collaboration to build research tools for themselves. CERN, LIGO, NIF, Arecibo — the list goes on. Other fields of science struggle to do the same. A…
A collection of market failures1 in science.2 If I’m missing your favorite market failure, please let me know. Scientists are incentivized to withhold as much information as possible. Scientists are incentivized to, and often do, withhold a…
I spend a lot of time deflating people’s dreams that machine learning can help them with their problem. Everyone knows there’s been a revolution in machine learning (ML) over the past decade. But they tend to not know that the revolution ha…