Ryan Collison

Neural Interfaces The Line Between Brain and Machine Is Already Blurring The Core Insight Your brain is an electrical organ. Neurons communicate through voltage spikes—tiny electrical pulses that propagate across networks of billions of cells. Those spikes encode everything: perception, memory, intention, consciousness. We're learning to read

Synthesis: What Neuroscience Actually Tells Us About Being Human After seven articles exploring the frontiers of brain science—connectomics, optogenetics, glial cells, neuroinflammation, the default mode network, and predictive processing—it's time to step back and ask the harder question: What does any of this mean for understanding

Motor Prosthetics: Restoring Movement In 2006, Matthew Nagle became the first human to control a computer cursor with an implanted brain electrode array. He had been paralyzed from the neck down after a stabbing four years earlier. Now, with 96 tiny electrodes in his motor cortex, he could move a

Synchron: The Less Invasive Competitor Here's a question that keeps neurosurgeons up at night: what if we could put a device in someone's brain without actually cutting into their brain? Tom Oxley, a neurologist from Melbourne, thought about this problem for years. The obvious barrier to

Mind Uploading: Science or Fantasy? Let's go to the edge. Everything we've discussed so far—Neuralink's electrodes, Synchron's stentrode, motor prosthetics, sensory restoration, cochlear implants—is real. Working. Demonstrated in humans. The technology is at different stages of development, but it exists.

Cochlear Implants: The Success Story If you want to know what a mature neural interface technology looks like—not experimental, not research-only, but actually working in the real world at scale—look at cochlear implants. Over a million people worldwide have them. Children born deaf get implanted before their