Tina Sharkey

Live Brain Mapping Unites Capital, Science, and Humanity

I convened the Brain Salon last Wednesday as part of the Cultural Index series at Studio by Tishman Speyer at Mission Rock in San Francisco, alongside zem joaquin of Near Future Summit . Tishman Speyer has become one of those rare institutions that invests not just in physical spaces but in the conversations that happen inside them. Their global Cultural Index series is proof of that. 104 founders, investors, scientists, philanthropists, & thought leaders came together across the intersections of brain science, capital, & humanity. Zem opened by moderating a conversation about the personal journeys that brought David Krane & me to that stage. Then I took over to interrogate Edward Chang on the science. Dr. Eddie Chang is the Chair at the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery and founder of Echo Neurotechnologies. He showed us what it looks like to map a living human brain in real time while the patient is fully awake, talking, giving thumbs up signals, one millimeter from his motor cortex. Nobody moved. Eddie & his team have cracked what he calls the neural code, the electrical grammar of the human brain, and used it to give voice back to people who lost it. A man named Poncho had not spoken in fifteen years. His 1st decoded sentence: "I want to see my family." This is what happens when world class science & AI work together to restore human potential. We also heard from Blake Gurfein , Founder & CEO of Fareon on using physics to calm brain inflammation, & Robert Hill of TAE Life Sciences on destroying cancer cells from within at the cellular level. Afterwards, breakout roundtables with Paul Stamets on psilocybin & the future of brain medicine, Dean Ornish, M.D. on reversing Alzheimer's, & Blake on brain inflammation drew people in for hours. The conversation running beneath all of it: we are living through an extraordinary acceleration in brain science, & the collaboration between remarkable scientists & AI is building new models of how the brain works that will change what is possible for human health & human potential. That is a future worth building toward, right? My personal journey, why this day was my re-birthday, & the consciousness & soul questions we have yet to answer will be in a longer essay on my Sparks with Soul substack. Video from the day coming soon. Thank you to the Tishman Speyer superstars for the full convening Alicia Parker Trecia Laird, Aimee Drummey , & Alexa Lowenfish , Courtney Karnes & the Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP & our extraordinary community that showed up & made this what it was. Too many to name but grateful for every one of you, including Cynthia (Cindy) Clarfield Hess Joanna Drake Lisa Edwards Lily Kanter Doug Mandell Philip Theodosopoulos Brigette Lau Rachel Lehmann Haupt Tiffany Shlain Sydney Mintz Jenny Lefcourt Sean White Chip Adams Bradley Horowitz Anne Ornish Dawn Dobras Tad Buchanan Monisha Perkash Deirdre Findlay & so many more.