Neurotechnology

I've travelled from Cambridge, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts to spend half a week with some folks who are building neurotech for a wide range of applications.

Whilst I won't/can't go into the specifics, a few lessons I feel I've learned:

1. Questioning the status quo is almost always worthwhile. Pareto gains compound by definition, and there's so much about pre-paradigm fields (e.g. neuroscience) which can be improved upon, given a little out-of-the-box thinking.
2. The notion of doing good doesn't just include donating to the causes which effectively alleviate the world's problems. If you're in a position to contribute to a problem that you deeply care about, it may be worth pursuing. Some might argue that you have a moral obligation to work on the problems that you can solve, but this is something that I'm still thinking about.
3. Iterate on the things that matter most: if you can remove the externalities that prevent you from accomplishing something that matters to the mission, the rest follows.

I've been learning a lot of maths, engineering, and neuroscience. Peering into the glymphatic system has been fascinating, and it's incredible how we can develop readouts of their activity by picking the correct abstraction.

My experiences here so far have also strengthened my belief that the silo-building of academic specialisation is actively detrimental. Whilst the self-similarity of different dynamical systems hits a limit at some point, having a large scientific toolkit to wield is almost always helpful.

I've also learned a lot about operations and scaling: they're not just buzzwords...