Edward Chang

This advancement, published in Nature Neuroscience, allows for the control of a full-body virtual avatar that can talk and move in sync with the user's intended actions.

Neurosurgeon Edward Chang led the team that implanted thin electrode arrays on the sensory motor cortex of three patients with paralysis.

These arrays captured neural signals as participants attempted to speak and perform gestures like a hand wave or thumbs up.

Unlike previous systems that could only handle speech or movement independently, this new approach successfully integrates both, thanks to machine learning decoders trained on concurrent data.

And I started talking to people in performance fields, in particular neurosurgeons, people who deal with life or death circumstances for many, many years and maintain immense calm.

One of my closest childhood friends is, you should have him on this podcast, it's, his name is Dr. Eddie Chang, and he's a neurosurgeon At UCSF, he's the chair of neurosurgery, and he's brought people out of locked-in syndrome to speak through AI.

He's also a bioengineer.

He's also been my friend since we were seven years old, and we talk three times a week these days about science.

And then I think I lived enough and observed enough hardship.

We've talked about some of this on a previous podcast.

I talk a little bit about that in the book, but, but I observed it out there too, not just in my own life, that I, I started to realize, especially if you stick your hands in enough brains and you see my good friend Eddie Chang record from the brain of a awake human and remove a tumor and save that person's life.

And you also realize that brain areas are controlling things because when they're stimulated, that person feels and responds in a certain way.