Edward Boyden
Edward Boyden
Edward "Ed" S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist at MIT. He is a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is recognized for his work on optogenetics. In this technology, a light-sensitive ion channel such as channelrhodopsin-2 is genetically expressed in neurons, allowing neuronal activity to be controlled by light. There were early efforts to achieve targeted optical control dating back to 2002 that did not involve a...
ProfessionScientist
thinking helping computer
Suppose there are some things that we don't understand about the universe, but if you understand human intelligence and you understand the gaps in our abilities to think about things, maybe we can engineer in a computer more advanced intelligences that can help augment our ability to think.
philosophy thinking long
You can imagine over very long timescales, perhaps far beyond the multi-decade time scale, we might be able to ask very deep questions about why we feel the way we feel about things, or why we think of ourselves in certain ways - questions that have been in the realm of psychology and philosophy but have been very difficult to get a firm mechanistic laws-of-physics grasp on.
thinking consciousness conscious
We don't have a "consciousness meter" that'll tell us exactly how conscious something is. I think we might get there eventually.
thinking goal feelings
I think the definition will change as we learn more, but my working definition of solving the brain is: one, we can model, maybe in a computer, the processes that generate things like thoughts and feelings, and two, we can understand how to cure brain disorders, like Alzheimer's and epilepsy. Those are my two driving goals. One is more human-condition oriented, and one more clinical.
thinking trying different
I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.
morning thinking giving
One thing that I've been doing for a long time is to wake up really early. I try to get up around 4 or 5 in the morning, long before most of my lab members are up, which gives me some quiet time to really think without distraction. I think that's important.
thinking people working-together
If you think backwards from a big problem, and you talk to all these other people who have skills and who think forward from their skills, it's very easy to form collaborations because everyone is incentivized to work together.
thinking cells brain
It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.
reading thinking creative
Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.
computer deliver device exactly information needs points record
What I'm really interested in is this idea of a 'brain co-processor' - a device that can record from, and deliver information to, so many points in the brain, with a computational infrastructure in between - a computer that can process the information and compute exactly what needs to be restored.
allow appealed circuit electrical interested regard
I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.
giving chemistry
Unlike optogenetics, where there are existing nonprofits that give away the DNA for free or at cost, expansion microscopy requires chemicals to be used, so having a company that makes the chemistry kit that anybody can use can save time.
succeed
If we succeed, it makes no sense to keep it only for ourselves.
understanding brain kind
If our brain is understanding some parts of the universe and not understanding other parts, and those understandings are about the laws of physics that our brains are built on top of, then it's kind of a loop, right?