neuroscience – Sukshma

Neuroscience-led Ventures

A friend with a PhD in statistical modeling of brain signals recently shared his view that solving the Brain is a final frontier. Neuroscience and related areas continue to attract the best of breed from engineering, sciences and of course philosophy.

Entrepreneurship and technology are not exempt either. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem at hand, we’re still understanding the biological content of thought, we’re still trying to understand what makes someone effective on a job, or an effective speaker of a language and there are many mental illnesses that need attention.

Here’s a quick roundup of ventures I believe are led by developments in Neuroscience.

Lumosity.com – Games that help you stay sharp.

Pymetrics – Games to help you find your career fit.

Muse by Interaxon – An EEG headset that makes it easy to interpret your state of mind.

Elevate – Another Brain training app that’s also been selected by Apple as the App of the year of 2014.

MagicLeap – Immersive 3D that leverages how the Brain coordinates visual and sensory signals to construct environments.

I imagine that even after we’ve cracked our brains we’re still going to be susceptible to Magic.

Immersion

A lot has been written and said about why Brain Games, or Brain Training works [1] and doesn’t work. If you listen to what Jane McGonigal [2] has to say, she says that games are a panacea for many of our ills, including productivity [3]. Where does the truth lie? I would think claiming to be a panacea is a skeptical one at best. I would really like to investigate more before I make up my mind.

Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that by performing a set of actions repeatedly with a game on a device, you have a close to random chance of enhancing your mental abilities.

Immersion is an intriguing quality of the mind. It is the capability of every mind to make a scenario realistic by filling in the blanks, to allow itself to wholeheartedly engage with a scenario that isn’t real.

We’ve been playing fun games with our three-year old boy. One of these games involves running a pizzeria where my son is a pizzeria owner and he’s responsible for everything from taking orders, baking the pizza to specifications and finally delivering it to observe the delight on the customer’s face. It gives my son the opportunity to practice recalling the toppings we chose and who ordered what. The game is greatly inspired by Papa’s Pizzeria [4] and the only change we’ve made is to play it in real life using building blocks for toppings and hardboard books for pizzas. Moreover, we’ve been playing it together with him; my wife, his nanny, grandparents and me. It gives us all an opportunity to interact with each other and him.

Through immersion we get an opportunity to directly engage processes that govern our response to specific scenarios. It seems reasonable to think of it in this way. Then games are simply an inert medium or a psychological mirror. Similar to games, is the framework for the pizzeria.

Immersion is pretty valuable, it encourages visualization of a future that doesn’t necessarily exist just yet; it’s the reason why Mathematicians can claim that Math is the closest we can come to the language of the Gods; it allows the writer to communicate scenarios to his readers in words; it’s the key to a meditation session; it allows this blogger to think someone will read what he has to write :-).

Immersion also allows for some strange things to happen.

Using VR, experiments have shown that pain can be communicated without directly hurting the observer [5]. The opposite is also possible, phantom limb pain in amputees can be reduced and altogether eliminated through the use of a simple mirror [6]. This shifts the very idea of what we’re intending to treat.

What else can immersion solve?

Care to hazard claim as audacious as everything? I wouldn’t do so simply on the back of the idea that we don’t understand immersion completely. But it is certainly applicable to every problem, and valuable to try where there isn’t any other effective medicine.

“The Mind Makes it Real”

Neo, Morpheus Training

[1] Brain Training 101, readwrite.com.
[2] Jane McGonigal, author “Reality is Broken”.
[3] Jane McGonigal on Productivity, School of Life.
[4] Papa’s Pizzeria To Go! Itunes.
[5] The Magic of the Unconscious Mind.
[6] VS. Ramachandran’s Mirror Box.

Meaning Meaningless

“What’s happening?” Have you ever had anyone ask you that?

As a beginner in meditation, I’ve often struggled with both sides of the question. At times, I’ve felt that my practice has resulted in a whole lot. From deep insight to even the occasional hallucination. At other times, its nothing at all. Perhaps reality is somewhere in between? You are just sitting down, watching the mind. And then again, there might just be something happening. Like a glacier scraping down a mountain side, its fingerprints are everywhere and its easy to miss recognizing what’s changing the landscape.

Three years down the road, I’m only now getting to a stage where I can occasionally turn my attention to the physiological state of the body to sense how far along I’ve come in a meditation session. In the beginning, the mind is stormy, tumultuous and ragged. Twenty minutes in, I discover the body is at peace, stable, quiet. Needless to say the mind follows.

And then there’s the pace of technology.

When I first saw the Muse headset at Le Web, I was blown away as it had the potential to marry metrics (a favorite subject) with the mind (another favorite subject).

I wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines. The team of Mindfulness Inc. saw that too and have recently shared their invention with the Kickstarter Community. I learned about it through a friend who tweeted it out. A lotus that blossoms with changes in you brain waves. Wow?! Talk about great design. That was way better than I’d imagined it.

The Lotus is a great idea for someone starting out like me. This is what meditation actually does and you can see it happen better this way than any other inorganic method. Meditating with the Lotus can realistically improve your chances of staying on the wagon. Although I do wish it were to come with a warning. If you’ve come so far as to start a practice in a search for answers, I’d share that getting past that mindset instantly is exactly what this is all about. The earlier you deal with this question, that much better for your practice.

As a Zen master once referred to the mystery of meaning,

“If we are looking at something, it can vanish from our sight, but if we do not try to see it, that something cannot vanish. Because you are watching it, it can disappear, but if no one is watching, how is it possible for anything to disappear? If someone is watching you, you can escape from him, but if no one is watching, you cannot escape from yourself.”

– Shunryu Suzuki.