New episode with Dr. Tom Oxley, co-founder and CEO of Synchron. Synchron has built a BCI called the Stentrode, which reaches the motor cortex via a blood vessel — leveraging the approach of cardiovascular stents, without having to open the skull at all!
15 million people live with motor impairment. The Stentrode lets people operate their phones and computers through thought, and could restore independence to people who’ve lost the ability to control their devices. Tom sees BCIs as a major technological leap that will help human flourishing, by enabling better communication, decoding and conveying emotions, and enabling us to leverage the great capabilities of our computing infrastructure.
This was a great, wide-ranging conversation. We discuss the origins of Synchron, the endovascular approach and its benefits, their next-gen system designed for high-channel-count recordings across distributed brain regions, the longer-term possibilities of helping people communicate better, how Tom developed as a founder and how he leads the company, how BCIs could unlock powerful mental states similar to psychedelics and meditation, how neurotech will transform humanity in the 2030s and 2040s, and why Tom thinks the US will lose the BCI race to China unless the US greatly accelerates. Hope you enjoy!
Links to this episode and references below.
Topics Covered
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:18 Carl Jung, stroke surgery, and the road to BCI
00:06:58 The endovascular approach: reaching the brain without surgery
00:10:37 Getting Synchron off the ground
00:17:23 Reading the brain: channels, signal, and noise
00:36:41 The numbers: 15M patients, FDA, and Medicare
00:43:17 Cognitive AI: foundation models, the data economy, and the 2040s
00:52:55 Consciousness, psychedelics, and the extended self
01:02:51 Agency, addiction, and geopolitics
01:06:51 The optimistic vision: unlocking the subconscious
01:10:49 Building a company: 696 no’s
01:21:30 Losing the BCI lead to China
Links From the Podcast Episode
Guest + Organizations
Research Papers + Technical References
“Neuronal ensemble control of prosthetic devices by a human with tetraplegia” (2006)
Meta open-sourced sEMG (neural wristband) datasets at NeurIPS 2024
References Mentioned in Conversation
Books + Media
Links
