There is a growing interest in coupling technology with the human brain, from devices that monitor brain activity and help relax or stimulate the mind, to the more ambitious goal of creating high‑speed connections between brains and computers.
This year, CES in Las Vegas made it clear that brain technology is becoming one of the next major frontiers in health tech. Several companies demonstrated devices aimed at measuring, training, and enhancing mental states. CES is a show I used to attend regularly in my years as a corporate vice president at Intel, back when residential broadband was just beginning to reshape the world. Seeing this new wave of brain technology brought back memories .
While I helped drive the creation of today’s residential broadband, few people know that I was also a pioneer in EEG biofeedback. In 1966 I joined Professor Joe Kamiya at the University of California, San Francisco. I was twenty‑one, a hippie and jazz pianist with an unusual talent for designing electronics, and I was making ends meet as the night manager of a pizza parlor. Through a friend, Mel, who was a medical resident working with Joe, I was introduced to this scientist who had a radical idea: if people could see and hear their own brainwaves in real time, they could learn to change them.
Joe believed that with feedback, people could learn to control their own brain states. He was right. Mel told Joe I might be able to build the equipment he needed to test this theory. Joe explained his vision and asked if I could make it work. I told him I didn’t know, but I would try and that if I succeeded, I wanted a job. He agreed.
For the next two weeks I worked in Joe’s lab during the day and made pizzas at night. In less than a week I completed the first task, and Joe kept his promise and changed my life. I quit the pizza parlor and joined the lab, first as a technician and later as a research assistant. Joe became my mentor, teacher, and friend. He turned a wandering musician into a scientist. Why he took that chance on me is something I still don’t fully understand.
The equipment I built would look crude today. Brainwaves are extraordinarily faint electrical signal, only about 10 to 100 microvolts when measured at the scalp, roughly 100,000 times weaker than a AAA battery. We used around twenty electrodes attached to the head, which was messy and uncomfortable, especially with hair. I designed ultra‑low‑noise analog amplifiers using the first generation of operational amplifiers, filtered the signals to isolate different frequencies, and then digitized them with a custom‑built computer i designed and built, all in real time.
Based on the frequency detected, I generated feedback which was mostly sound, sometimes light that changed as the person’s brainwaves changed. Joe was particularly interested in alpha waves, which oscillate at about 8 to 12 cycles per second and are associated with calm alertness. He had studied Zen monks in meditation and wondered whether ordinary people could be trained to produce similar patterns. They could. With feedback, people learned to shift their mental state and their brainwaves followed. I even used the system myself to improve my own concentration, and it worked focusing in this application on beta waves which result from attention.
That lab was also where I had my first experience working with.a computer, a PDP‑7. It weighed about 600 pounds, stood six feet tall, and had less memory than a single photo on my iPhone. Once I discovered programming, and yet another door opened, the ability to create something out of nothing.
Three years later, I left UCSF to help found the Thoraxcenter at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where I directed the computer department and worked on cardiovascular monitoring and diagnosis. It was there that I received my first academic appointment and began publishing in medical journals. Five years later I became an associate professor of cardiology at Tel Aviv University. Yet I always missed the world of biofeedback.
About twelve years ago, I discovered a small Finnish startup with a simple but powerful idea: monitor sleep and physiological signals and give people feedback about their own bodies. I helped assemble and invest in its seed round. That company became Oura Ring, now one of the leaders in wearable health technology. It is still the best investment I ever made.
Now, sixty years after I joined Joe Kamiya’s lab, interest in brain technology is exploding. We are seeing EEGs in headsets and earbuds, and serious efforts to connect brains and computers directly. I have my own ideas about how to build such interfaces in ways that are far less invasive than current approaches like Elon Musk’s Neuralink. I may yet explore them.
These days I enjoy science more than business, and helping people live better lives more than making money. That is one of the quiet privileges of being eighty‑one.
Here is an article on the CES and brain stuff
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