You're not supposed to put anything in your head. Don't put it in your ear. Don't take your finger

out of your eye. Take your finger out of your nose. This is what our mom told us the whole

time we were growing up. Now we're actually putting something in our brain. I'm Mick Ebeling,

founder and CEO of Not Impossible Labs. For the past 15 years, we've been on a mission to change

the world through technology and story by addressing societal problems to improve the lives

of everyone. With a crew of engineers, hackers, entrepreneurs, technologists, storytellers,

and artists, we've tackled and solved some of the world's most incredible challenges. But here's

the thing. We're just a small team in Venice Beach. The world is full of people making the

impossible possible. My goal now with this podcast is to find these people, share their stories,

and hopefully, together, we can keep pushing the limits of what's possible. On today's episode,

we talk to Dr. Jamie Henderson, who's using deep brain stimulation to help people with

neurological conditions live better lives. See our first participant back. I'm interested in

astrophysics now. I'm reading Stephen Hawking. Eureka, spike the ball and the touchdown.

Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Jamie Henderson. So Not Impossible and the Not

Impossible podcast is all about this effort, this goal that we have to constantly expose

people to the fact that given all the bad stuff that's going on in the world right now

that our species and our planet is constantly evolving and there are things that are

transferring from impossible to possible every single day, every single week, every single

month. And we want to highlight that as just a celebration of our humanity and a celebration of

the progress that we're making. So what was the path that got you to where you are today?

Yeah, it's actually a pretty lengthy story. It starts when I was quite young. When I was five

years old, my dad was involved in a really bad car crash, and it left him really barely able to

move and really barely able to communicate. So I grew up knowing my dad as a person who

was in there. He would get the jokes that we would tell. He would try to tell jokes himself.

But his communication rate was so slow and so labored that was very difficult to understand

him. As an example, just even figuring out what he wanted for supper, the one word he could get

out really well was fish. So we knew that he wanted fish. But other than that, it was almost impossible

to understand him. And so although I wouldn't say that it necessarily motivated me directly,

I mean, I didn't ever in my memory say, well, I wish I could fix this problem. But it did get

me interested in the brain. What is this brain? How does it work? What can we do in order to

understand it? And the other motivation that I had as a kid was science fiction, as many of us do.

And some of the most compelling books were those in which people were interfaced to machines. And

to me, this was just an incredibly cool and interesting concept. And this was back in the

1970s and 80s when these things really were practically impossible. That's incredible.

And is your dad still alive today? He died at the ripe old age of 82

after living a long time. And that was because of the care my mother took of him.

He was the sort of person who, had he been in a care facility, a nursing home,

would never have survived that long. And did he ever have a chance to experience any type of

different technology or technology that could accelerate how he communicated?

Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. I think the technology, A, wasn't available. And B,

if it had been available, we wouldn't have heard about it. We lived in the middle of farm country

in Illinois. I grew up going to high school in a very small town where there was no AP math,

there was no AP science. And I ran out of courses in three years. So I went to college a year early

and really was kind of thrown into the deep end. So that was a shock for me,

not to have the kinds of academics I wish I would have had. So it was an interesting experience

sort of coming up through that. And did you know that it was going to be medicine? Was that

for sure the path that you felt yourself having to be on? The whole neurotechnology space just

had fascinated me since I was young. And so I really thought, wow, wouldn't it be cool to

to be involved in brain science and neurology and neurosurgery? And so I did hope to go to

medical school. I wanted to be a biomedical engineer, but my grades weren't good enough.

So I ended up going to med school anyways. You know what they call the person that finishes last

in med school? Doctor. That's exactly right. But thankfully, I didn't finish quite last in

my med school class and was able to get into a neurosurgery program and then went from there

to become a neurosurgeon. And what type of neurosurgery do you do now? What's your day

to day? I know that right when we finish this podcast, you're going to be running off to surgery.

So most of what I do is what we mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, which is

treatment for Parkinson's disease. So neurotechnology, placing devices that

interface with the nervous system, either for recording or for stimulation.

And so deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's has become a standard treatment now. And that's

mainly what I do in my day to day. And for those that don't know what deep brain

stimulation is or DBS, as we'll call it in this conversation, my very pedestrian

and unsexy way of describing this is you figure out how to drill two little holes in the top of

the head, stick some wire or some metal in there and connect that to a pacemaker type of device

that's able to elicit some type of signal that is able to then with the goal of doing something,

whether it to be to correct or stop or inhibit a tremor or, you know, since that's mostly what

you're doing, is that a fairly accurate pedestrian way to describe it? Yeah, it's fundamentally

correct. The wires are actually pretty sophisticated devices that have eight contacts

on each side. And they're designed to be very resistant to any sort of bending or breaking.

The pacemaker devices are also computers in and of themselves and deliver pulses,

specifically timed pulses to these areas of the brain that we're trying to modulate.

And the idea is to take these abnormally functioning circuits and try to bring

them back into registration. So one of the theories as to how this might work is that

Parkinson's and maybe other neurological disorders as well may be due to abnormal

synchronization of brain circuits. So brain circuits that should be firing separately

begin to link together and oscillate. And by knocking those brain circuits out of their

oscillatory patterns, it's possible that we may be able to improve the symptoms of Parkinson's.

But that's just one theory. There are a number of theories. We still don't really know

how it works. And when the DBS is installed, are you titrating kind of the levels,

the frequency, the intensity? What are you modulating there? So I'd say there are several

parameters that we can adjust. We can adjust the rate or how fast the pulses go. We can adjust the

width of the pulses. We can adjust the amplitude of the pulses. And there are now more modern

and sophisticated systems that can actually vary the waveforms. And as we learn more and more about

how DBS works, we're then able to tailor it more specifically to individual patients.

Now, we're going to come back to DBS in a second, but this whole concept of using

electronic stimulation on the brain, while it sounds science fiction, it is pretty crazy that

you are putting metal rods into people's heads and that's improving their quality of life.

Metal rods, I think is a little crude. We'll go with that.

You're inserting a piece of metal into people's heads and that is improving their quality of

life. That to me, when you say that out loud, you're not supposed to put anything in your head.

Don't put it in your ear. Don't take your finger out of your eye. Take your finger out of your

nose. This is what our mom told us the whole time we were growing up. Now, we're actually putting

something in our brain, but the concept of using stimulation on the brain is actually not a novel

thing. It's been done for a while. This is our fit. Honestly, we do research before any topics

that we are going to discuss. I hope that you know about this. And if you don't,

then I feel like we have a little small victory here. 49 AD, a Roman physician

documented the use of an electrical torpedo fish to relieve headaches and gout.

You knew about that one. I was hoping we could sneak one in past you, but I guess not.

Describe a little bit about what you're trying to do. I think you mentioned it for a second.

You talked about neural circuits. I think you described it also as trying to recalibrate. I

think the way you used it is to recalibrate what's going on there. Go into a little bit more about

that. We've learned more and more about how the brain works over time. It's really interesting to

think back to my undergraduate days or my med school days in the 80s and what we knew about

the brain then versus what we know about the brain now. It really has been an incredible

explosion of knowledge. Part of that knowledge has been gained because of some of the interventions

we do, like DBS, for example. Another area that's been ... This may sound a little bit

tangential, but I'll get to the point. That's right. You're talking to Captain Tangent here,

so sign me up for the ride. Epilepsy is really an area that's allowed us to study the brain a lot

because when we treat people with epilepsy, we have to monitor their brain in order to learn

what parts are malfunctioning so that we can target those parts for therapies.

You talked a little bit about it in terms of the MRI. Understanding where you need to recalibrate

or rewire neural circuits ... Again, what we try to do is to describe things in a more simplistic

way. That's my crude definition of DBS earlier. If I'm looking at a circuit board, I can physically

see a circuit board. If I see that something's not working, I can physically see what's happening.

We can't look inside the brain unless we're going through an MRI. What you're doing,

you're doing a comparative study where you're looking at a, quote, normal brain or a brain

that's firing versus one that isn't and looking and seeing where those signals are or are not

firing. Is that how you create that map to be able to create a roadmap or a measure to go in

and try to correct? There's a technique called functional MRI, and I don't know how familiar

you are with it. Functional MRI works by the principle of blood oxygen saturation and the fact

that neurons, when they're more active, consume more resources. They consume more blood flow.

They consume more oxygen and glucose. Some very clever MRI physicists figured out that you could

track these changes in vascular blood flow by using this technique. Functional MRI or fMRI

is a brain scan that tracks changes in blood oxygen. When a region is more active,

it uses more oxygen, which lets us see those hot spots in real time.

Let's talk about the BCI work really quick, and then we'll get on to a couple other things that

we wanted to cover. Sure. Yeah. I don't know how much you know about this aspect of my work,

but it's really my main research, which is brain-computer interfacing. I reference back to

my childhood and reading books about interfacing machines and people. That stuck with me throughout

my entire career. It really became a long-term goal for me to achieve that. That is something

that really has gone from not possible to possible. Over the intervening years,

the technology improved more and more to the point where around the turn of the century,

maybe a little bit later than that, there was enough excitement in being able to record from

groups of neurons and do useful things with them that a company was actually formed.

Think about Neuralink, for example. This was Neuralink, but before its time, a company called

Cyberkinetics was founded. One of the co-founders of the company was John Donahue, who is at Brown

University and really one of the pioneers of this field. They demonstrated the ability of a person

with paralysis, with spinal cord injury, to control a computer cursor with their mind.

That was circa 2004 or so. Since that time, the technology has continued to advance. We are still

using the same sensor, for better or for worse, that was used 20 years ago, but many groups,

including the University of Pittsburgh, us here at Stanford, Caltech, and others have

have pushed it to the point where we're now able to decode speech. We're now able to

have a person who is unable to speak or unable to intelligibly speak attempt or

imagine speaking and have the computer produce words. For me, that was really full circle.

That's pretty incredible. The way that they're able to think and speak,

that interface, is that an implantable device like the devices that you're doing with your trial?

It is. It's an implantable device that it's placed just on the cortical surface.

It goes about a millimeter and a half into the brain and records directly from the neurons,

directly from the brain cells. it allows you to record from, we currently have, 256 channels, which is

not bad, but also not great. In order to improve decoding, you need more channels.

Sure.

That's why I'm very excited about companies like Neuralink that are pushing towards 1,000 channels

plus. If that device turns out to work well over time, I think that's really going to give us a

lot of new capabilities. I'm extremely excited about the future of that field.

That's fantastic. I think this answer is obvious, but in the last, say,

five years, has AI and the advancements in AI dramatically improved your ability to

map and decode and interpret the signals that you're picking up and studying?

Oh, definitely. A big part of what we're doing is using language models

and recurrent neural networks. Machine learning is really vital to everything that we're doing

right now in terms of decoding brain signals. The word and the term neural networks is used

for things that have nothing to do with the brain, per se, and you're using it,

and it's for the brain. It's actually extra appropriate.

A brain-computer interface, or BCI, is technology that links your brain directly to a computer.

It makes things possible, like moving a cursor or robotic arm, just by thinking.

Talk about your aha moment, the moment where the results were coming out and you realized,

wow, we're really on to something. I don't know that there was an aha. That which is often –

By the way, every doctor and scientist that I talk to always says that, well,

it was the gradual amalgamation of many aha moments. I was like, no, we want that moment.

We want that touchdown. Eureka, spike the ball on the touchdown. Damn you people with your patience.

If only there was.

This is the only way progress is made, is by just continuing to push forward despite the

lack of these aha moments. I think there are moments where that elation hits you,

where you see our first participant back a month later after turning her stimulator on,

and you hear her stories about reading three novels. I think she was just showing off,

but she's like, yeah, I'm interested in astrophysics now. I'm reading Stephen Hawking.

Flex. You're just showing off.

That's a flex.

There was a bit of an aha moment for our BCI study for speech when we realized that

some of the indexing that we had for some of the channels that we were looking at

was actually backwards. By switching things around the right way, things clicked into place.

And we then understood a lot more about how that activity was structured.

Watching it work, actually having it work, where she was attempting to speak a sentence,

and word by word that sentence appeared on the screen, that was quite an incredible.

That was quite a moment.

There's a group of researchers in, let's see, it's in Geneva right now who are using a bridge

from the base of the spine to go over the break, where the break of the spine is. And that person

now is able to think about walking, and it's causing their legs to move. Again, going back

to what you said, using the brain as the master control. There's a movie, one of my favorite

movies, is a movie called The City of Lost Children. And there is the scene, the master

character is this brain in what looks like, it's a very weird science fiction-esque movie.

But the main character is a brain in this jar, this bubbling kind of blue fluid.

But he, it's a he, it's a male voice, controls everything. I think what you're talking about,

especially with the BCI, is having someone be able to restore. We have a lot of people

in our world at Not Impossible who are blind, who are deaf, who are in wheelchairs, yet their brains

are intact. And for us, it provokes and inspires us so much to see the work that you're doing,

and that others are doing, is like, no, no, no, okay, yes, there's been a break in the road,

there's a log across the road, but we might be able to span that sometime in the future.

What are your thoughts on that in terms of the physicality, not just the thinking, the speaking,

but the physicality with BCI? Sure. I mean, that's been the thrust of my research over my entire

career is, on the output side, you've got BCI and reading neural circuits to interpret what

they're trying to tell you. And then on the input side, to put signals back in to the nervous system

to affect some function. It really is about building replacement circuits for those broken

parts of the nervous system. And I think we're coming ever closer to achieving that. The work by Grégoire Courtine

that you referenced at EPFL in Geneva is terrific. It's unbelievable. It's really

surprisingly crude, to tell you the truth. The way that they've approached it,

there is so much headroom in terms of how much better it can be.

I think that's inspiring that it is crude, because you're literally just trying to duct tape a wire

on either side of the broken bits and get that connection back going. Again,

it's inspiring to hear you say that. But again, there's a lot of

incredible neuroscience and engineering under the hood that makes that whole system work.

Sure. And it's driven by a number of advancements that we talked about earlier,

about better understanding of the nervous system, about faster computers and better

machine learning algorithms. And the future is incredibly exciting.

Dr. Henderson, thank you so much for joining us today. This is not the last that you're

going to hear from us. I think we're going to have to come back and have an entire conversation

around neuroethics. We're going to have to have an entire conversation around BCI and some of

the advancements that you're seeing in that space. I think that would be a really fun conversation to

have with you. But thanks. I appreciate it. I know how busy you are, and I know you're doing

some incredible work out there. So thanks for everything you do. And thanks for joining us today.

Thanks, Mick. It's been a lot of fun.

Amazing.

And that wraps up another episode of the podcast where we talk to some of the most

fascinating people who are transforming the impossible into the not impossible.

A big thank you to Dr. Jamie Henderson for implanting this conversation in us

about his work with brain technology and changing lives for people with neurological conditions.

It's conversations like these that remind us how science and technology can rewire hope

for our future. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platforms. And remember,

change is hard. But making the world a better place? It's not impossible.