Hello Future Fans,
It is rare that I come across a new development that has the potential to drive truly radical and explosive change. I recently had the pleasure of this feeling when I discovered the interview with Mary Lou Jepsen in the (February 18) archives on my favorite podcast, After On.
Mary Lou has a storied career across some of the world’s greatest tech companies, including Alphabet’s ‘X’ moonshot lab and Facebook (working on Oculus). She has a PHD in Optical Physics from Brown University, has been a professor at both MIT and RMIT, has generated 200 or so patents, and was the founder of the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ project. She was recognized in TIME magazine’s “Time 100” as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and also as a CNN top 10 thinker. She has the credentials to pull off something big.
Mary Lou founded a company called ‘Open Water‘, and the technology being developed there has truly stunning potential that might revolutionize medical diagnosis and, potentially, be a realistic ‘neural lace’-style technology i.e. a technology that can connect our brains to each other and the global network in real time, at scale.
The Open water technology leverages holographic principles to map structures inside the body, in real time, at micron accuracy. The method uses near-infrared light shone at the body; a very small percentage goes straight through the flesh and the rest is scattered as it interacts (collides) with our biology. Amazingly, the scattered light can be captured by regular phone-scale optical sensors and re-constructed via algorithms, providing a real-time high-definition view of the smallest components of our bodies. The technology appears to be so sensitive that it can even detect the behaviour of individual neurons. This is exciting enough (phew!), however there is also some chance that the technology could use light to directly interact with the body, providing localised treatments and even – admittedly at a long shot / over the much longer term – implant / create memories and information in the brain. Continue reading “Brain-to-brain & brain-to-cloud communications … and an explosive health care improvement”