The maxim, “Know thyself” has been round because the historical Greeks. Some attribute this golden world data to Plato, others to Pythagoras. However the fact is it would not actually matter which sage mentioned it first, as a result of it is nonetheless sage recommendation, even right this moment. “Know thyself.” It is pithy nearly to the purpose of being meaningless, nevertheless it rings acquainted and true, would not it? “Know thyself.” I perceive this timeless dictum as an announcement concerning the issues, or extra precisely, the confusions, of consciousness. I’ve all the time been fascinated with understanding the self. This fascination led me to submerge myself in artwork, research neuroscience, and later, to change into a psychotherapist. Right this moment I mix all my passions because the CEO of InteraXon, a thought-controlled computing firm. My objective, fairly merely, is to assist folks change into extra in tune with themselves. I take it from this little dictum, “Know thyself.” If you concentrate on it, this crucial is type of the defining attribute of our species, is not it? I imply, it is self-awareness that separates Homo sapiens from earlier cases of our mankind. Right this moment we’re typically too busy tending to our iPhones and iPods to essentially cease and get to know ourselves. Beneath the deluge of minute-to-minute textual content conversations, e-mails, relentless alternate of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and Tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is meant to be about within the first place: Ourselves. A lot of the time we’re transfixed by the entire methods we will replicate ourselves out into the world. And we will barely discover the time to replicate deeply again in on our personal selves. We have cluttered ourselves up with all this. And we really feel like we’ve to get far, distant to a secluded retreat, leaving all of it behind. So we go distant to the highest of a mountain, assuming that perching ourselves on a chunk is certain to present us the respite we have to kind the litter, the chaotic on a regular basis, and discover ourselves once more. However on that mountain the place we acquire that stunning peace of thoughts, what are we actually attaining? It is actually solely a profitable escape. Consider the time period we use, “Retreat.” That is the time period that armies use once they’ve misplaced a battle. It means we have to get out of right here. Is that this how we really feel concerning the pressures of our world, that to be able to get inside ourselves, it’s a must to run for the hills? And the issue with escaping your day-to-day life is that it’s a must to come house, ultimately. So when you concentrate on it, we’re nearly like a vacationer visiting ourselves over there. And ultimately, that trip’s obtained to return to an finish. So my query to you is, can we discover methods to know ourselves with out the escape? Can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world to be able to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we search? Can we reside right here and now in our wired net and nonetheless comply with these historical directions, “Know thyself?” I say the reply is sure. And I am right here right this moment to share a brand new means that we’re working with know-how to this finish, to get aware of our internal self like by no means earlier than — humanizing know-how and furthering that age-old quest of ours to extra absolutely know the self. It is known as thought-controlled computing. It’s possible you’ll or could not have observed that I am sporting a tiny electrode on my brow. That is truly a brainwave sensor that is studying {the electrical} exercise of my mind as I give this discuss. These brainwaves are being analyzed and we will see them as a graph. Let me present you what it appears like. That blue line there may be my brainwave. It is the direct sign being recorded from my head, rendered in actual time. The inexperienced and pink bars present that very same sign displayed by frequency, with decrease frequencies right here and better frequencies up right here. You are truly trying inside my head as I communicate. These graphs are compelling, they’re undulating, however from a human’s perspective, they’re truly not very helpful. That is why we have spent quite a lot of time occupied with the best way to make this knowledge significant to the individuals who use it. As an example, what if I may use this knowledge to learn the way relaxed I’m at any second? Or what if I can take that data and put it into an natural form up on the display screen? The form on the fitting over right here has change into an indicator of what is going on on in my head. The extra relaxed I’m, the extra the vitality’s going to fall by it. I may be fascinated with understanding how centered I’m, so I can put my stage of consideration into the circuit board on the opposite facet. And the extra centered my mind is, the extra the circuit board goes to surge with vitality. Ordinarily, I might don’t have any means of understanding how centered or relaxed I used to be in any tangible means. As we all know, our emotions about how we’re feeling are notoriously unreliable. We have all had stress creep up on us with out even noticing it till we misplaced it on somebody who did not deserve it, after which we understand that we in all probability ought to have checked in with ourselves a bit earlier. This new consciousness opens up huge potentialities for purposes that assist enhance our lives and ourselves. We’re attempting to create know-how that makes use of the insights to make our work extra environment friendly, our breaks extra stress-free and our connections deeper and extra fulfilling than ever. I’ll share a few of these visions with you in a bit, however first I need to check out how we obtained right here. By the way in which, be at liberty to test in on my head at any time. (Laughter) My staff at InteraXon and I have been creating thought-controlled software for nearly a decade now. Within the first section of improvement, we had been actually enthused by all of the issues we may management with our thoughts. We had been making issues activate, gentle up and work simply by pondering. We had been transcending the house between the thoughts and the system. We dropped at life an unlimited array of prototypes and merchandise that you could possibly management together with your thoughts, like thought-controlled house home equipment or slot-car video games or video video games or a levitating chair. We created know-how and purposes that engaged folks’s imaginations, and it was actually thrilling. After which we had been requested to do one thing actually huge for the Olympics. We had been invited to create an enormous set up on the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics, had been utilized in Vancouver, obtained to regulate the lighting on the CN Tower, the Canadian Parliament buildings and Niagara Falls from all the way in which throughout the nation utilizing their minds. Over 17 days on the Olympics, 7,000 guests from all around the world truly obtained to individually management the sunshine from the CN Tower, parliament and Niagara in actual time with their minds from throughout the nation, 3,000 km away. So controlling stuff together with your thoughts is fairly cool. However we’re all the time fascinated with multitiered ranges of human interplay. And so we started trying into inventing thought-controlled purposes in a extra complicated body than simply management. And that was responsiveness. We realized that we had a system that allowed know-how to know one thing about you. And it may be a part of into the connection with you. We created the responsive room the place the lights, music and blinds adjusted to your state. They adopted these little shifts in your psychological exercise. In order you settled into leisure on the finish of a tough day, on the sofa in our workplace, the music would mellow with you. If you learn, the desk lamp would get brighter. For those who nod off, the system would know, dimming to darkness as you do. We then realized that if know-how may know one thing about you and use it that can assist you, there’s an much more priceless software than that. That you could possibly know one thing about your self. We may know sides of ourselves that had been all however invisible and are available to see issues that had been beforehand hidden. Let me present you an instance of what I am speaking about right here. This is an software that I created for the iPad. So the objective of the unique recreation Zen Sure is to wrap a rope round a picket type. So you utilize it together with your headset. The headset connects wirelessly to an iPad or a smartphone. In that headset, you’ve material sensors in your brow and above the ear. Within the unique Zen Sure recreation, you play it by scrolling your fingers over the pad. Within the recreation that we created, in fact, you management the picket type that is on the display screen there together with your thoughts. As you concentrate on the picket type, it rotates. The extra you focus, the quicker the rotation. That is for actual. This isn’t a faux. What’s actually fascinating to me although is on the finish of the sport, you get stats and suggestions about how you probably did. You might have graphs and charts that inform you how your mind was doing — not simply how a lot rope you used or what your excessive rating is, however what was happening within your thoughts. And that is priceless suggestions that we will use to grasp what is going on on within ourselves. I prefer to name this “intra-active.” Usually, we take into consideration know-how as interactive. This know-how is intra-active. It understands what’s within you and builds a type of responsive relationship between you and your know-how as a way to use this data to maneuver you ahead. So you should use this data to grasp you in a responsive loop. At InteraXon — intra-active know-how is one in all our actually defining mandates. It is how we perceive the world inside and replicate it exterior into this tight loop. For instance, thought-controlled computing can train kids with ADD the best way to enhance their focus. With ADD, kids have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a excessive proportion of theta states. So you’ll be able to create purposes that reward centered mind states. So you’ll be able to think about youngsters enjoying video video games with their mind waves and bettering their ADD signs as they do it. This may be as efficient as Ritalin. Maybe much more importantly, thought-controlled computing may give kids with ADD insights into their very own fluctuating psychological states, to allow them to higher perceive themselves and their studying wants. The best way these kids will have the ability to use their new consciousness to enhance themselves will upend most of the damaging and widespread social stigmas that people who find themselves identified as totally different are challenged with. We are able to peer inside our heads and work together with what was as soon as locked away from us, what as soon as mystified and separated us. Brainwave know-how can perceive us, anticipate our feelings and discover the very best options for our wants. Think about this collected consciousness of the person computed and mirrored throughout a complete lifespan. Think about the insights which you could acquire from this sort of second sight. It might be like plugging into your personal private Google. With regards to Google, right this moment you’ll be able to search and tag photographs primarily based on the ideas and emotions you had whilst you watched them. You’ll be able to tag photos of child animals as blissful, or no matter child animals are to you, after which you’ll be able to search that database, navigating together with your emotions, quite than the key phrases that simply trace at them. Or you could possibly tag Fb pictures with the feelings that you simply had related to these recollections after which immediately prioritize the streams that catch your consideration, identical to this. Humanizing know-how is about taking what’s already pure concerning the human-tech expertise and constructing know-how seamlessly in tandem with it. Because it aligns with our human behaviors, it could possibly enable us to make higher sense of what we do and, extra importantly, why. Creating an enormous image out of all of the necessary little particulars that make up who we’re. With humanized know-how we will monitor the standard of your sleep cycles. When our productiveness begins to slacken, we will return to that knowledge and see how we will make simpler steadiness between work and play. Have you learnt what causes fatigue in you or what brings out your energetic self, what triggers trigger you to be depressed or what enjoyable issues are going to convey you out of that funk? Think about should you had entry to knowledge that allowed you to rank on a scale of total happiness which individuals in your life made you the happiest, or what actions introduced you pleasure. Would you make extra time for these folks? Would you prioritize? Would you break up? (Laughter) What thought-controlled computing can mean you can do is construct colourful layered photos of our lives. And with this, we will get the thin on our psychological happenings and construct a narrative of our behaviors over time. We are able to start to see the underlying narratives that propel us ahead and inform us about what is going on on. And from this, we will discover ways to change the plot, the result and the character of our private tales. Two millennia in the past, these Greeks had some highly effective insights. They knew {that a} basic piece falls into place whenever you begin to reside out their little phrase, whenever you come into contact with your self. They understood the ability of human narrative and the worth that we place on people as altering, evolving and rising. However they understood one thing extra basic — the sheer pleasure in discovery, the delight and fascination that we get from the world and being ourselves in it; the richness that we get from seeing, feeling and understanding the lives that we’re. My mother’s an artist, and as a baby, I might typically see her convey issues to life with the stroke of a brush. One second, it was all white house, pure risk. The following, it was alive along with her colourful concepts and expressions. As I sat easel-side, watching her rework canvas after canvas, I realized that you could possibly create your personal world. I realized that our personal internal worlds — our concepts, feelings and imaginations — had been, in truth, not certain by our brains and our bodies. For those who may assume it, should you may uncover it, you could possibly convey it to life. To me, thought-controlled computing is as easy and highly effective as a paintbrush — another instrument to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds inside us. I stay up for the day that I can sit beside you, easel-side, watching the world that we will create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we will make about ourselves. Thanks. (Applause)