From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak

The brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer. You can solve computational problems by arranging matter in a certain way and then, like, taking your hands off and pressing go. We talk about being a brain in a vat. That's what the skull is. Like, the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves. These little cables that carry your interaction with the world. If you can get the visual signal, auditory signal, balance, motor, in and out of the brain, that is an end in itself. That is the central object. The retinal prosthesis right now, I think, is a great proof of concept that we're on the right track. Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a of a blind patient in this way. We need to add depth of grayscale. We think we could see a path to get at least red and green. And so there's ways that we can compound upon this path through an engineering process to make a product that's better and better. Hi, listeners. Welcome back to no priors. Today, I'm here with Max Hodak, the founder and CEO of CYENS, formerly of Neuralink. We talk about Prima, the implant that helps people who have gone blind see again, which just got regulatory approval in Europe. Their quest to sustain the human experience and substrate independence for the brain. We also talk about alignable representations between AI models and the future of neuroscience. Welcome, Max. Max, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. So for anyone who is not familiar with science, can you just describe a little bit about, you know, why you start the company, leaving Neuralink, what the mission is? Fundamentally, we're a medical device company. But I think if, like, the mission of lowercase s science is to use a differentiated understanding of the universe to improve the human condition, I mean, that's that's the mission of uppercase s science. That's what we do. We use, specifically an understanding of how to work with the brain to get big effect sizes that you don't get in medicine often. Our main product is a retinal prosthesis. You can think of it like a cochlear implant for the eye. Cochlear implants are some of the biggest impacts in in all of medicine. I mean, you can if you've ever seen a video of a newborn turning on, turning it on for the first time, it's striking. And our goal is to to build things like that, including our primo retinal prosthesis. And for people who are not familiar with that, it's a chip Yes. That's inserted with glasses. It's so it's a tiny chip that's implanted under the retina in the back of the eye for patients that have gone blind due to loss of the light sensitive cells in the eye. So, specifically, this is …