Mark H. Myers, Ph.D. - CEO/CTO NeuroDyne

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom podcast. We have Mark H. Myers with us today. He's a CEO/CTO at Neurodyn. He's a PhD, an assistant professor, anatomy and neurobiology at University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Uh, great background that Mark has. Uh, have a couple of, uh, PhDs, right? Or at least a couple of areas of expertise. Biomedical, I'm seeing here. Medical engineering. Computational neuroscience, right? So I was impressed with your background when you were on the Spark Tank show, and always like, uh, talking to smart people. So welcome to Pods. Uh, tell me a bit more about yourself, Mark, and what you've been up to.

Thank you so much, Charles. It's a pleasure to be on your program. Um, so as you mentioned, uh, I went down the education route when I was selecting a career, and it was really an evolution, uh, starting with physics and eventually going back to school with a need for a computer science master's. You'll want to, of course, make more money with a master's degree. And then the bug hit me in the area of computational neuroscience, the idea of using very complex tools such as neural networks, non-linear dynamics, and even modeling of anatomy through these approaches. Put together some very novel ideas, not only in the idea of neurological issues, but also the idea of discovering consciousness and trying to simulate consciousness in anything from robots to models to whatever. So it was extremely rewarding career. After a period of time, I decided to move more into the area of what's called translational neuroscience, the idea of building devices that would eventually help other individuals, so go to market and help out those individuals that I was seeing on a regular basis. So based on that, my first product, the remote epilepsy monitoring device, would satisfy a very niche market, right? One that was in high demand but would satisfy those individuals that may or may not truly have epilepsy, but nonetheless, their seizures are starting to move in more frequent fashion. One of the examples I've told other individuals is that while I was at an epilepsy monitoring unit as a graduate student, this is this huge command center. Of television screens. And one of them focused on a little girl that came all the way from Central America. Due to the distance and the time for her to get to the epilepsy monitoring unit, she was end-stage epilepsy. That is, there was no longer an intervention that could be done. So, this became a force for me to go after the idea of doing a just-in-time, a product that can be delivered directly to the patient and therefore get in front of these type of issues. Then these type of issues are actually more common than I've realized. This idea of sudden unexpected death by epilepsy, or SUDEP, affects individuals who are not properly diagnosed within epilepsy monitoring unit or sent home. And once their seizures start to increase, they don't move in a linear fashion. They move from several seizures to many seizures in a given moment's notice. So we fit to that area. We provide a solution for those individuals. And just like the movement into mobile health, we developed a neurological solution that could help these individuals.

Right, and epilepsy is very debilitating. I have my friend Carlos Quezada that's the president of NorCal Epilepsy. Do you know Carlos?

Yeah, absolutely. His work is pretty well renowned.

Yeah, I like this guy a lot. But yeah, before we get to this, let's start with the deep end, like consciousness, right? Like what's your definition of consciousness?

It's an excellent question. If you talk to individuals either in psychology or psychiatry, they would say it's more or less perception. But the idea of perception is this idea of stimulation that evokes a response, right? So, the amount of stimulation or the correct aspect of the stimulation, you always get repeatable responses. From our standpoint, we say that the brain is always shifting from different states: awake, ready, sleep, again, sometimes seizure states, right, for certain individuals. But along the lines of concentration, right, someone that's actively involved in, say, some task or working with other individuals, we've been able to model this idea of phase transitions. This is a concept where we see similar type of behavior within the populations of large neuron areas throughout the scalp. And we're able to see this type of grand mall type behavior where all the intersections of brain regions start to finally cooperate and they operate in a very rapid fashion. So this idea of phase transitions is more analogous to a series of waves within the ocean. They're normally not present, but when an individual is engaged in, say, higher-level processing, they become very formalized. You start to see this type of behavior. And then to emulate this into, say, something like a robot model couldn't be more thrilling. It becomes one of the definitions of what we say capturing this idea of consciousness and then putting this into what was formerly an inanimate object.

Right. And perception, I guess, is a great definition. I guess it was came about through evolution, right? Like, as a mechanism to survive, is that our human consciousness— yes, and animals— like, way more higher definition. It has like more shades, more colors, more complexities. We're like social creatures as well, so we added that layer on top of the consciousness factors and us being conscious of being conscious and asking yourself questions, if that's even a thing, right? Like, uh, That could be not a thing. Like, we could be like asking questions that, that is not even relevant. But how can you see consciousness in an MRI brain scan? Is it the best way to measure consciousness? Is there like an energy output? Also, why do all of these brain areas cooperate together to come up with consciousness? Isn't there like one specific zone that helps, which is related possibly with ophthalmology, right? Like the sight. Of like, because we have mental imagery as well, and we have these perceptions and these concepts and these images, or at least my brain thinks that way. So give me a bit more details here.

No, all fantastic questions. Lately there's been this terrific discussion along the lines of a mind-body extract— excuse me, mind-brain extraction, right? That to the point that you mentioned, can you really directly measure consciousness or is it truly just an abstraction that can't be measured? And therefore, it is formed or is some idea that others have tried to capitalize on what exactly is going on with the brain. In terms of modalities, and as far as measurement is concerned, a lot of it has been behavioral up to this point. We look at the behavior of an individual, we say, oh, he's obviously behaving in, say, less of a primitive manner, he's doing something more than breathing, he's doing something more than sleeping. And of course, we see that type of behavior with encephalitic individuals, the purely brainstem. But to truly engage and try to measure this idea of consciousness, you need a very, very, very, very well-defined goalpost, right? What exactly is the activity that you said, say, is consciousness? And how is it being measured? As far as, let's say, modalities to capture that, EEG has been a terrific modality to look at the type of I guess what you call transduction of a chemical activity within the brain, say potassium sodium pathways, and then how that converts then to electrical activity. So there's a direct relation, you see, to what's actually going in the brain, the actual measurement in terms of electrical activity, and what's occurring in that measurement. We only see this type of phase transitions within higher order of individuals. Or if you want to, you could try to perform it, say, in this idea of chaos theory, trying to actually enact the series of very regular waveforms. But it's extremely challenging. So So you'd wait days, years, whenever for this chance type of occurrence to occur. But with the brain, it's highly defined. It is directly related to behavior and fits perhaps even with the perception mode, this idea of what we're calling measurable consciousness. And I'll go one step further.

Neurochemicals as well, right? Like you mentioned the sodium-potassium pathways, but like neurochemicals, it's like more serotonin, more dopamine. What would make me more conscious than you from a measured standpoint? And is that related to intelligence?

Again, a terrific insight. When we talk about hormonal release such as serotonin, even OxyContin in some instances, these drugs have been known to be internally released by the brain when someone is going through, say, some idea.

OxyContin would make you less conscious, my opinion.

I think it has its place.

It zombifies you, you know?

Well, sure, I think it enhances consciousness, to be honest with you. So you have that layer of understanding, and then—

but MDMA though, MDMA would be probably enhancing, and psilocybin, right? Like, I'm not sure why I'm saying that, but, uh, yeah, go on.

No, again, all excellent, uh, perceptions, right? Uh, these are, in my opinion, enhancement type modalities. It's really no different than any type of internal or external stimulation, right? But is that defined as part of consciousness? And I don't think so. Now Having said that, there is this idea of emotional intelligence, this idea that individuals who then put on, say, the great joy that they receive, say, by doing mathematics or playing an instrument or doing art, does that enhance consciousness? To an extent, but it is exactly what it's set out to be, a stimulator, something that's then attached onto this basal type of consciousness mechanism. What I found to be the best measurements is through electroencephalograph. It can also be measured through magnetic encephalograph. But MRI is more or less so what's occurring with the functional or the anatomical aspects of internal mechanisms such as the brain. You could then look at the brain, say, without peeling away any skin or bone through an MRI modality. Now, actually witnessing consciousness, that's really nothing more than a series of images of functional activity of anatomy. So it's a little bit harder to make that decision.

Isn't consciousness like your ability to define reality? And if so, wouldn't a computer be more conscious than me from that definition, like an AI?

Right. So anyone who's had a type of computer science class are told day one that you start with a black box, right? And then you start putting peripherals in it. You put it at the CPU, you put in the long-term and short-term memory. So it starts to sound a lot like a human, right? But the problem is that it's still a box at the end of the day whose influence is happened by its maker, right? You could choose whatever religious significance you may want. But the bottom line is that everything that this computer is told to do is very atomic. Go print the file, go add better verbiage to my sentence, right? Go find me the best date possible, not based on my selection, but based on the actual activities of my choosing,, right? But all of that is programmatically set out, you see. Now imagine that you have a system that programs itself, that comes up with its own algorithms, that comes up with its own solutions. That becomes a very clear distinction, say, between what we, what we see in humans or even higher mammals versus computer. Now some may argue that ChatGPT is getting there, right? Gemini is getting there. It's, it's formulating its own programs, it's forming its own solution, but it doesn't have a need to form these solutions. And that is one of the key breakoffs between what we see in artificial intelligence and humans. This idea of why, why am I doing this? What is my motivation to do this? A computer will never have a motivation.

And I think it can be injected motivation. Arguably the model has it now, but it's deployed, it's not recursive, right? Like once it's agentic, we have a problem, a beautiful one as well. I think that's when we'll get takeoff and superintelligence. And arguably us humans, something injected desire in us and need and wants, and that's evolution or nature, or some of us call it simulation, right?

Right. Well, I mean, so you then define, say, well, a genetic agent has purpose, right? It has a reason to do something, right? It does this something in the community of other genetic agents, right? Starting to sound a little bit like human behavior, but again, it'll never say why it does it. Right? They'll never say, what is my motivation to do it? That is my motivation to live? Is my motivation to have a better life? Is my motivation to say just serve, right?

Is it because we have body that we have this desires? Does, uh, does consciousness need a body?

Well, it definitely needs input, right? There's no question about it. One of the amazing things about neural behavior is that it has this basal external noise just like it needs oxygen, just like it needs nutrients in order to survive. So a brain that does not have any kind of stimulation, even the basal stimulation that's internal, will eventually kill neural cells. So then we once again look at external stimulation as nothing more than enhancement to this current noise paradigm. But the difference then between, say, noise and, say, chaos, right, this idea of either distributable noise or one that's centered, say, in a particular frequency range, then we start to see this idea of emerging patterns within the brain.. And these emerging patterns that can relate directly to this idea of thought and consciousness.

And is, um, is consciousness, uh, the, the same around this, uh, AGI paradigm in which we're like, oh, we're not sure if we have AGI right now because we don't fully understand it and the problem, and more discoveries will lead to better questions, better definitions of the problem itself, and in 10 years from now we'll absolutely fucking know what consciousness and AGI is?

I think we have to frame what is consciousness, and more importantly, what's the usefulness of trying to impair— excuse me, place in a consciousness, say, in some inanimate object like a computer or a server or what have you, right? And there lies the absolute answer, right? The crux of the issue, and that is the idea of either placing consciousness or consciousness being merging from some definition is nothing more than it being a tool. If we look at these agents as a tool that enhances our work, our lives, then it quickly moves us in the direction of, oh, well, not only is this helpful, but deserves to stick around. It deserves for us to give life to these agents, and therefore they serve a purpose.

What's the usefulness of us humans understanding consciousness? What's the value in that? Why have we always sought to understand the why, why there is intelligence, why we were there in the first place.

Yeah, if we go back to the great philosophers, right, like, like Fermi, or, or even the very earliest philosophers like, like Thales, right? They've been asking the exact same questions for almost 3,000 years. So why consciousness? Why the need for it, right? I think we're uniquely positioned as higher organisms, right, to ask these questions. It doesn't mean we deserve the answers,, but we can ask these questions to satisfy our purpose. Some people say— I'm going to move in a particular direction now. Some people say that poetry, the idea of poetry and the creation of it, and then therefore the absorption of what's being said, is the why or how of why we should live, the purpose of why we have anything to do on this Earth. Now, would an ancient Egyptian have the same type of feedback, say, from a beautiful poem a beautiful piece of artwork or a beautiful piece of music. And I highly question that, right? Because by doing so, it's saying that, oh, well, now I have an appreciation for everything around me and now I can understand the world a lot better. They'll never happen, right? And the need for that is not really needed. Now, can it make a comment on it? Can it say, well, you know, Da Vinci's work has proven to be, you know, so, so, eventful that it's made the future artists create a similar beautiful work? Sure it can. It gave you all the commentary every day, but what is the need of that commentary to, to an agent?

Well, it's, it's us humans, it's clout, right? It's like social, uh, get up in the, uh, social hierarchy. Intellectualism is pretty much the same. It's like, oh, look how smart I am. And you're smart in the business world, uh, you get a lot of money, right? And then you get like higher status, higher higher social status, right?

So there's no question that there's individuals like that, uh, but I'd like to say that there is a sizable population out there that gets an internal type of meaning, right?

Yes, right. Sure. Yes, yes.

These are not individuals that decide to drop out of the social world.

But my question is like, how do we get out of our human nature? Like, um, in a Cyberpunk future is I can, uh, Neuralink myself and control these instincts and not go for social clout and just go for pure discoveries for, uh, benefiting full humanity, right?

I think it's to, to then take a step back to what that activity is. You hooking on, say, Neuralink or any type of, uh, you know, a mind image scanner that is able to derive things like, uh, like letters, right, or ideas or complete sentences, right? The activity of doing that is simply creating another arm or leg or peripheral, right, that you already have with you. So once again, it's a tool that helps out to your current self to do something, right? But in and of itself is not, is not self-propelled to say, well, I'm going to give you feedback that's a lot better than what you were thinking about in the first place, right? Yes, you can do that, but you still haven't answered why to do that, right? So yes, hook on the box to the top of your head, you're able to move mice with with your, your, your motor, motor activity. And it's been proven to be very successful with paraplegics. But does it do anything more than, say, enhance the reason why you're doing something?

And say we jump like 10, 20 years from now, and I'm Neuralinked, um, I'm smarter in pretty much all kinds of ways, um, right? More successful at business, understanding humans, talking, everything, right? Meditating. But with that look like? Would it be merged biologically with my brain, like a merger of biology and then computing? How can I make sure it doesn't fuck up my existing brain, right? Uh, is it removable if I don't— if I want to opt out? Like, any thoughts on this?

It's, it's a, a great question, right? That then, the, then what's, what's being offered here is a way that would induce, uh, different types of, um, of brain states, of different types of thought processes within, say, your current neurological systems. And that is a very good usefulness for these type of agent systems, right? Something that has possibly gleaned something from perhaps the old meditators, right? Or the great thinkers, right? And they're able to induce a state of, say, flow. That is, you're able to get information as fast as you can take it in, right? Or you can even induce things like looking back into yourself, introversion, This is a great peripheral. This is a great tool that makes a lot of sense. So there's no question that perhaps in the next 5 years that type of intervention will be there. We know depression currently has an intervention mechanism. It's kind of like a very lightweight shock therapy, right? But it does it in very, very small voltage increments. So we're already using this type of neuromodulation to satisfy states such as depression.

Before we go there, what did it make more more sense to deploy nanobots in my bloodstream and deploy neurochemicals to fix my current state instead of— it feels Neuralink is like infinitely complex, right? Or at least to my mind. And I have to, um, yeah, I'm talking about it from an optimization perspective as an entrepreneur that wants to always go faster and higher. Uh, but yeah, obviously for depression, right? It's like as soon as their neurochemicals go down, well, the nanobots and, uh, step them up in real time, right? Um, with AI or through an app. And let's say I'm working right now, I need more caffeine in my system, I just like stream up the, the caffeine. I'm not sure how nanobots could produce caffeine, uh, from nothing basically, but, uh, what would you think about that instead of, uh something that's very invasive and that's in my brain.

No, I think there's no question that this idea of nanobots, or let's say even this idea of introducing systems within your bloodstream that can introduce a neurochemical release, right, serotonin, your OxyContin. I wouldn't even give it 10 years from now before that type of engineering is introduced. I'm probably thinking close to 5 or 6 because I know it is actively being worked on right now. Currently, we have a system that you can swallow a pill that would do a gastroanatomical type of imagery and then just simply passes through. So this idea of creating something yet smaller, right? Or even something that assembles dynamically within your body's cavity or even an area within your brain to do this type of, let's say, hormonal intervention, we're definitely moving in that direction. And I know it's actively being worked on.

Yeah, Nespresso business model. So you inject like a capsule here And then it goes in your system, you can select like what exactly.

Well, I think the beauty about such an approach is that you wouldn't need the chemical itself, right? It would go directly to what those hormonal release mechanisms are and then just simply release it.

Because isn't that the key to better thing? I mean, the limits are biological at this stage, right? The Neuralink, there's no limits because it'd be connected in the clouds, But isn't it a good— I can't picture it. I mean, I probably can, but I haven't thought about these things in a while. But how can a machine simulate my thoughts is like the question for you. How does that happen physically?

Well, okay, I wouldn't say that. Right, right. No, it's excellent questions, right? And this specific question will be asked for another, I'd say another 50 to 100 years, right? To simulate your thoughts, to create the you within the machine. We then go to what are the things that we know, say, makes your decision process, makes you who you are, right? We know that population of neuron activity, but we also know that there's a structure that the neurons sit upon, and that's called glia. And the glia is a formalized protein structure throughout the brain, right, that each of these neurons sit on and create the different weightings, right, and then create the different links to other neural population. So if you do nothing more but capture this glia structure, right, put that into a computer and say 100 years from now, redope it with several balances of neurons, would that indeed be you? And there's been some great movies that have already discussed this at length. If you look at these movies that try to epigenetically change DNA that looks exactly like the individual that you're trying to emulate, you still have behavioral issues, right, that are interjected during someone's someone's development years. So then we talk about nature versus nurture, right? This problem of you have this hardwired person that you possibly have captured within the machine, you then want to regrow this from scratch. Would that be the same person? The problem even with that technique is that that person was frozen at a given time, let's say 100 years ago, and then you put them onto a future that looks completely different with other mores, with different input, right? Think of the individual of, say you put yourself now in the 18th century, right? How do you communicate? How do you relate to anyone? How does anyone relate to you, right? It's almost like being an alien being dropped into a planet, right? But it's your people, it's your great-great-grandparents, right? You'd think that there'd be some way to make it happen, but these are incredible questions that I have no doubt we'll continue to work on.

Yeah, it hurts my brain to think about it, right? Because if you think of some kind of surgery, you're trying to not affect the existing memories or the current pathways, right? So you could think the patient would be in a brain fog for like a couple of days and then would get exponentially smart as this, this thing would adapt, um, biologically, right? Connected to the cloud. And, and let's say we— let's assume we have AGI. But at this pace that Neuralink is going, do you think they'll achieve something around these lines in 10, 20 years? Like, it seems infinitely complex to crack that.

Well, it's not infinitely complex, but it's, uh, it comes down to a series of steps that have to happen in particular, particular pattern, right? And anything could happen, right? One thing you guarantee is what do we as humans, uh, strive for, and therefore this is the direction that a tool such as Neuralink will go, go into, right? And first, first and foremost, it's always economy, right? It's always the capability of how could I monetize this and in some fashion. And then once you get beyond that, it's like, well, what other uses does it have to make me feel good, right? To help me either do my work faster or help me have more spare time. And these are deliberate type of activities that affect any type of development. As any entrepreneur will say, you may have this blue sky idea of creating, you know, a happiness park, but you know for sure, the individual that come in there will have a slightly different agenda. And this type of different output will change the rate of development.

Mark, thanks for being on today. Where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, check out my website, neurodyneinc.com. That's what the type of products that we're working on now. We're working on, let's say, several stages of products. So the type of products that we will be offering this year is both epilepsy monitoring, traumatic brain injury, as well as sleep apnea. Next year, we'll be introducing migraines, and then several intervention techniques that we actually spoke about today.

There you go. That was Mark and Charles Cormier.