1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
|
Timothy Marzullo
Brain is not magic. Um. Okay, so, I'm Tim Marzullo. I'm starting a company, I have venture backing. My motivation is, we have an educated audience in the room. If you go out into the public, and if you ask them how the brain works, you might get some mumbling about serotonin, and something about electricity. Most people have no idea about other organs either. Kidneys are filters, the lung is an exchange mechanism, the heart is a pump. The brain and nerve system is difficult to understand. Most people don't have the faintest idea of neurophysiology. What I want to do is change the perception that the brain is magical. People tend to think that the brain is magical, love and dance. And that there's some magical thing that makes it work, maybe it is perception, but I've always wanted to change this.
In grad school, and my early postdoc years, I went out to secondary schools. Here's showing functional neurophysiology, where they take out ice cream, and then one person is a lesion machine, and then a person is the motor cortex, and they put ear muffs on, and if it's visual you put on blinds, and prefrontal cortex you play games. And it's all very fun. The thing is that we design these demos, with balloons, nerf balls, synapses, and alot of the neuroscientists have done outreach too. You feel good at the end of the day, but do they really understand the neuroscience?
We want to create the tools and students of all ages, from 5 years old to 80 years old. We want them to become the amateur engineers and citizen scientists. Like I said, we design those demos. As an electrophysiologist, I wanted to show students and parents, I always wanted to show a spike, which is an action potential. Those who are familiar, you know that you have to go to a big institution, bang on doors of labs, and even if you're a good student, you're finally allowed into a lab, maybe if you prove that you can wash dishes, and finally you can use this $30k rig to do it on animals, and you're 21 and you finally doing some neuroscience experiment.
I took it upon myself and my colleague Greg to have low-cost, easy tools to do basic electrophysiology. The two main things are off-the-shelf chips and insects. Using something without regulatory restrictions. I'm bringing it out to all over the world. So, this is an early prototype of the SpikerBox. It has a single channel amplifier, with an audio amplifier, and you can hear the neural spikes of the cockroach leg. I'm going to try to show the people in the room, I brought all my gear. I brought the insects, nobody stopped me. They are South American, so they don't move as fast. The prep is totally portable. Let's see if the leg hasn't dried out.. *various sound*
Do you hear this popping activity? Let me plug in an external speaker. I'm blowing on the leg, and there are barbs on the cockroach's leg, and they are playing to the speaker. When you hear the spikes, you've heard your first brain cells. This is a hand-made prototype. We've now transitioned to making boards. This is the first unit. Todd Huffman was one of our first customers, and he's going to walk out of this conference with a spikerbox. This was all home-made. They are intentionally made large enough for students to solder, learn about op-amps and so on. So, let's see if this one works. That's 3G. Go to a modern neuroscientist lab, they tell you to turn off your 3G phones. We're amplifying nerve system activity through speaker. I'm of the generation that thinks laptops are cool. If I can record my nerve activity on my laptop.. as entrepreneurs, you should listen to your end-users, the first comment was, "I want it on my phone".
We've listened to our customers. My advisors told me to listen to that. You can go to the Apple App Store, and you can download our free iphone app. You have now turned your iphone into an oscilloscope. You can see the spikes and thresholds, and if you have an ipad, you can do it. You can zoom in, do this all sorts of stuff, record, listen to files, and go well gee, .. can everyone hear that? That's not all, that's just a random experiment for my friends, email it, show off your spikes. That's the most beautiful sound in the world to me. It makes us what we are. We found that most people think it's really cool. So here's this middle school, this was not staged. THis was the very instant he heard the spiking, and he realized that's what's going on in his brain. We have a tally, and over 1600, have heard spikes for the first time because of our efforts. We've done it on subway, airlines, etc., and we've done it for where it hasn't been done away.
We're trying to make these kits, lesson plans for teachers to use this unassisted in their classroom, I'm 30, I hand-drew these lesson plans. So, uh, when you actually plug it in, you can do thresholding, it's a spike on the right. That's what it looks like, and then here's some more screenshots from the iphone app. This can be used at science fairs, and if you're so compelled, you can go on to the website, and you can buy them. We typically say 3 to 4 weeks, and Todd has been waiting 8 weeks. We're trying to make it more stable. Buy it this summer. We're not a one product company, we're also doing peripheral neuroscience, I developed an inexpensive manipulator stage microscope with built-in microscope.
A big share of the DARPA funding. Try to control bugs remotely. We all want to do that, I'm not the chair of harvard or cornell. So if anyone of you have, it's some electronics, and modified it to do some pilot tests, deliverying biphasic pulses to the antennae, and for less than $100, we're saving the tax payers money to get some insect control. I would love to have this. This is all self-actualizing.
We live like it's without pencillin, but when it comes to neuroscience. We've had people afflicted by tumors, drug addiction, etc., and in my family, almost everyone, my grandfather died by excessive pain. You usually have to wait until you're in your late 20s to do neuroscience research. Let's really bring ourselves into the next century. Let's get all students of all ages to study the brain, and not have to bang on lab doors. We're a startup, always looking for funding opportunities.
Thank you.
http://backyardbrains.com/
|
