so I’m here to talk to you about part of the future of neuroscience which is brain sensing technology we all know we’re in the midst of a sensor revolution we’ve heard all about sensors that track your sleep your steps your internals your prescriptions one thing that’s glaringly missing though is something that helps the consumer and the patient track their own brain there’s a lot of ways to actually do this there’s a number of different brain computer interfaces we have invasive ones like ACOG and brain gate we have stimulation technologies like transcranial magnetic stimulation direct current stimulation and now ultrasound we have cumbersome means of tracking one’s brain and sending it to a computer like MRI and then we have MRIs kind of for cousin which is functional neuro from red spectroscopy F nears and it’s able to track the hemodynamic response in a sensor that’s only this big and portable and then of course there’s a EEG this history of brain computer interface is actually quite long we started in the 1970s doing experiments where people could control simple things with their mind using alpha waves this is David Rosenbaum on the far left-hand side with John Lennon making music with his mind in the 1980’s we started to see technologies where monkeys could do rudimentary interactions and controls using invasive BCI the 90s began to let us see inside the head and start to recreate images and concepts from inside the head that could be seen outside we also started to see things like p300 spellers and BCI’s that humans could use to start interacting with their environment 2005 saw the launch of BrainGate this is Matt Nagel the first patient to be implanted with a brain Gate sensor that let him do rudimentary movement through a brain computer interface and now in the late sort of 2009 to 2014 we’ve seen the first consumer sensors on the market tools that let absolutely everybody tap inside the brain and see what’s going on and allow them to interact in some really meaningful ways for us we really wanted to transform this thing this is what EEG used to look like this is what AG can look like now this is Muse the brain sensing headband it’s a four channel clinical grade EEG and a slim little consumer form factor there are two channels on the forehead frontal and two channels behind the ears it slips on just like a pair of glasses and connect wirelessly to your smartphone or tablet we started it’s true clinical grade signal so this is a comparison of the Meuse in red versus active champ that’s a $36,000 clinical grade EEG obviously not as many sensors so you’re diminished in the places that you can gain information but you’re really opened up in terms of how you can use this device in practice and in healthcare I started working with this technology in the early 2000s the lab of dr. Steve Mann there we did our first concerts where people could make music with their own minds we then said this is amazing we can control stuff with our mind so we went on to create physical things that you could move with your brain this is the levitating chair as you would relax it would detect an increase in your alpha activity and cause the chair to rise towards the ceiling we’ve made all sorts of fun stuff like thought-controlled beer taps and thought-control toasters lock control thoughts lock our machines but this is probably the biggest thing we’ve ever been able to control with people’s minds at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics we did a project where people in Vancouver could control the lights in the CN Tower Canadian Parliament buildings and Niagara Falls with their mind from across the country pretty awesome this is a smaller version but possibly more important this is when BCI starts to tell people about themselves so this is a responsive environment that we created in stereoscopic 3d that could tell the user when they were focused and when they were relaxed and that would cause the environment to change in response to their brain state giving the user valuable information about themselves and allowing them to control something far more impressive than the CN tower their own mind we all know we’ve got a kind of crisis of the brain that’s going on two billion people worldwide suffer from brain based health and productivity challenges and they have very few solutions these days you look at ADHD when nine kids it’s diagnosed with ADHD 90% of the market and Ritalin stress-related illness anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of every single case you see walk into your doctor’s office is due to a stress-related illness with very little mechanism to help people actually understand manage and control their stress sleep 63 billion dollars is lost annually djor due to poor sleep and we all know how much our patients suffer trying to solve these problems so we created news calm music all tracks your brain activity and real-time sends it to your smartphone or tablet and then gives the user real-time feedback on their brain activity and an exercise that they can do to help them improve their cognitive function and decrease their stress so in muse calm we let people hear their own mind the metaphor that we use is that your mind is like the wind when you’re thinking ruminating distracted you hear it is windy and need to come to a state of clear focused attention you quiet the winds this very simple exercise going from states of distraction to focused attention allows people to do some really important things it helps you build your state of attention which helps you avoid external distractions sounds lights things in your environment it also helps you avoid internal distractions those negative thoughts feelings ruminations the things that come up that take you away from where you want to be some of you may be thinking this sounds a little bit like a gamified mindfulness tool it is mindful in mindfulness you do a focus to training attention to training focus attention training exercise where you bring your mind back to the object of your attention every time your mind wanders it’s your job to bring it back now in meditation you have to know when your mind has wandered and it may be one three five minutes before you bring it on back here within a matter of seconds you know so you can essentially get in more bench press reps at the gym and for all of you who say okay am i meditating is this working am I doing this right here you get real-time feedback so you know what your brain is doing and you remain on track you can also see your progress you can see what your brain was doing at every moment of the intervention you can see how you improve over time we have thousands of people who are using this now and they’re for reporting results from decreased anxiety decreased and depression improved sleep one of my favorite things to do is to just go on Amazon and see the reviews there and see how people are using it themselves there’s one woman whose husband had cancer and she said I’ve been using Muse to deal with the stress of my husband’s cancer and his doctor appointments and I’m nicer to my kids more supportive to my husband and feel like I’m becoming a better person there’s another woman who had cardiac arrhythmia and she entirely not on our advice has been using news in the absence of using her medication and his noticed improvements in her arrhythmia ie she’s had none so you have a whole range of consumers who are implementing these devices on their own and finding benefits I think it’s really interesting to find out what happens when do we bring this inside the system and control it and manage it in important ways to deliver this care meaningfully to your patients we also have another interesting aspect which is we have thousands of people engaging in EEG every single day with beautiful tagged datasets this provides an amazing opportunity for neuroscientists to actually look at this data and begin to understand changes in population over time with a way that one hasn’t been able to before so we did a fun thing we just looked at a very simple marker inside of our data set alpha peak it’s known in the literature that alpha peak decreases with age but it’s really not been known how it decreases and how it decreases decade by decade let’s take a look so this is a distribution of alpha Peaks folks in their 20s who use muse we have thousands and thousands of users so this is a very large database you can see that the Alpha peak peaks at 10:00 and then trails us so he Peaks 11 Hertz and trails off well this is what happens when you’re 30 this is what happens when you’re 40 when you’re 50 when you’re 60 and when you’re 70 kind of Awesome so we can actually see the decrease the downshift and alpha peak over time we can also see something that the data has that clinical data is never reported which is an increase in alpha power as you age we did a very simple little look at our data and looked at male versus female differences during our neurofeedback paradigm and we noticed that females tend to have significantly higher power at higher frequencies starting at alpha and Beyond there’s lots of ways to interpret this data so we’re doing over I think over 50 research laps now we’re currently using news both as a clinical grade EEG and as a tool with Muse calm they’re looking at epilepsy this can be obviously used to track epileptic seizures throughout the day not just when you’re in the doctor’s office people looking at a DD kids with a DD of high levels of theta waves dream state lowered levels of beta waves focus date when you teach kids to up regulate beta and down regulate theta like by playing a video game that they drive forward with their focus they can improve their EDD symptoms as effectively as Ritalin kind of astounding anxiety cardiac care there’s a facility in Canada looking at cardiac patients and demonstrating decreases in cardiac events using Muse Mayo Clinic is just about to start a study with breast cancer sufferers looking at how they decrease stress during their treatment and improve their decision-making outcomes so lots of opportunity once you take tools like this and you can bring them widely into the hands of consumers and patients when we look down the next decade of this technology in the short term you’re gonna see almost half a million of these devices by myself and my colleagues in the space over the next two years that’s half a million consumer EEG in people’s hands you’re also going to see these in clinical practice forward-looking clinics are gonna start to take these into their practices and give them to their patients instead of anxiety medication or depression making medication as a first-line preventative approach you’re also going to start to see FDA approvals rolling out last year marks the approval of beta theta ratio as a diagnostic for ADHD in five years you’re gonna start to see insurers and payers come come on board with all of these kinds of sensor technologies we’re starting to see them get over the hill by five years all of this is going to be reimbursed you’re also gonna see the consumer acceptance of stimulation technologies which are a few years behind passive reading technologies in terms of consumer approval but not necessarily in terms of clinical effect by ten years down the road these kinds of devices are going to look very different they’ll be significantly smaller they might be just a simple little tattoo like you see from MC ten they may be embedded in other technologies actually they will be in things like a Google glass and it’s gonna be really standard for the average consumer to monitor their devices and there’s signals including their EEG by twenty years down the road this kind of technology is going to be a natural part of our daily lives and our technology is going to know what’s on our minds and use that data to present it back to us so anxiety and depression isn’t going to be something where you take a pill anxiety and depression is going to be something that your iTunes playlist detects and then suggest music it knows in the past has made you calm or happy our technology will understand what’s on our mind and create constant interventions to help support us in our daily lives today we’re starting to see this being deployed right now we all have the opportunity to change healthcare and to change how people understand and manage what’s on their own minds thank you