Right now, those are not the subject of brain-computer interfaces, although I'm sure that there will soon be some sort of investigation into whether those pathways can be improved that way.

Can I go out on a limb here a little bit? Yeah, please.

So I sometimes, I kind of think that we're at a... phase of the development of the technology of brain computer interfaces, which is in some ways similar to where we were in genomics around the year 2000, 2001, where the first, if you think back to that moment, the first human genome was sequenced, right? That was like a pivotal moment in genomics.

And from the standpoint of how technology helped that field, there was in that moment a competition, a race between the private sector and the NIH-funded consortium of many laboratories across the country and across the world, which were trying to stitch together the first comprehensive map of the human genome.

And famously or infamously, the private consortium won, right? Craig Venter is sort of crazy.

you know, shotgun approach to sequencing one.

And to me, that mattered less than just the notion that moving ready or almost ready technology from the academic setting into the industry setting at the right moment has the potential to help tremendously accelerate progress.

So I think about this every day and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be in the field.

What happens deep in the brain, then?

Well, most of what's deep in the brain is wiring.

Not com- not all of it, but, but I would say most of what's deep to the surface is the wiring that connects the cortical surface to the rest of the body.

And then there are areas like, for example, um, the basal ganglia or the cerebellum, or the brainstem, that primarily subserve non-conscious functions.

So the smoothing out or the learning, unconscious learning of movements, breathing, vital, you know, vital functions that we don't think of, um, as part of our conscious experience.

So most of conscious human experiences is happening very close to the surface, and that certainly includes what we're focused on now which is movement.

And most of the way we interact with the digital world and the physical world is in some way through movement or intended movement.

Uh, people just sort of say, "Okay, they're laying there in kind of like a half sleep." Uh, but what can, for instance, putting a series of these brain computer interfaces on the brain of a coma patient potentially tell us about what's actually happening inside their mind as they're laying there?