How Brainy!

A $100-million project aims to build tools for interacting with the human brain.

10:48 07 April 2017

Bryan Johnson, the founder and CEO of Kernel, is investing $100 million to design tools for interacting with the human brain. Johnson, who sold his company Braintree to Paypal for $800 million in 2013, is joining Elon Musk and the US military’s research arm DARPA, among others, in seriously looking into opportunities to link mind and machine. 

 

Johnson said: "My objective with Kernel is to be able to read and write the underlying functions of the human brain. The first step to do that is to build better tools."

 

He added: "The brain is the most powerful form of generalized intelligence in the known universe. But we don't think about it as something we can explore."

 

He further emphasized the need to focus on understanding the brain saying, “The brain is most consequential endeavor in the history of the human race.”

 

Johnson, who started developing neural interfaces initially for therapeutic purposes, expects that his research will extend beyond medical workarounds for physical and mental impairments.

 

Due to the fact that past brain explorations, such as ice pick lobotomies, have failed, he is not overly optimistic about the possible results of his research, saying: "Every time humans have contemplated the possibilities of a new technology, our imagination has failed us,"