Wine or something theyll forget immediately lets make a donation on their behalf. So we went and had a meeting with this father and brother and said hey, were going to give you this money. What are you going to use it for . They said, i just want to be able to talk to my brother again. I just want to be able to communicate with him. I said, wait a second. How do you communicate now . They said, we do it with a device called a piece of paper. And the piece of paper has a letter, all the letters written on it. Go to the next slide. On that piece of paper when he gets to it, when we run our finger along it, he blinks. And we write that letter down. And then we repeat and we repeat and repeat and letters form words and thats how we communicate. I said, thats crazy. Why dont you have ive seen Steven Hocking and kristoffer reeves and these inventions that allow paralyzed people to talk. How come you dont have them . He said, we to enter have money or insurance. Theyre too expensive. So i have a process, and my process is that you commit and then you figure it out. So i said, all right. Heres what well do. [applause] were going to do two things. One, hes going to communicate again. Well get him a Steven Hocking machine. Two, well get him a device that allows him to draw, lets him do his art again. They said really . You can do that . I went, yeah. Big hugs. Yeah. High fives. And they left and we high fives and i went, holy crap. What did i just commit myself to . I had never put the words Recognition Technology together in a sentence and now i was claiming to do that. Part of my process as well is to invite brilliant people into my life. I like to be the guy at the party who is the dumbest guy in the room. If i am, that means that im the guy whos learning. I invite all these brilliant people to my house and we have a hacker weekend and come up with this concept if we could get a web camera mounted in front of someones eyes and then track with technology the pupil as if that was the tip of the pencil maybe temps could draw again. So we went about doing this and we came up with this device. The device is called the eye writer. Thats what it is. Its not pretty but its a web camera mounted in front of an eye. We took it to his hospital room and set up a projector in the parking lot and a wireless signal from his room down to the projector and he drew again. We projected it on the side of a building. He drew again for the first time in seven years. And it was this incredible thank you. [applause] it was this incredible experience. That was it. There wasnt a chapter 2 to this. There wasnt a, whats next . We did it. And so we went and got some drinks and talked about how awesome it was. Then we went to bed. Right . That was it. Then we woke up the next day. And it was time magazines top 50 inventions of 2010. It was diaz moetos eight Incredible Health inventions that transform lives. It is part of the collection at the moma. So on and so forth. Media and media. What the hell did we do . How did we do this, right . Then temp sent us an email and the email was this. That was the first time ive drawn anything for seven years. I feel like someone i was under water and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so i could take a breath. And we got that and i said, all right. I dont know what we did but we got to figure out how to do it again and for more people. That was the launch of not Impossible Labs and its based on this premise of technology but its technology for the sake of humanity. Its how do you hack . How do you modify . How do you take something that serves one purpose and make it apply to Something Else so it accomplishes a fundamental social need, some communication mobility freedom of expression Something Like that . And so this kind of sets the course of what we were doing with not Impossible Labs. So that was my chapter one. This is chapter two for me. Chapter two, july 11, last year a year and couple months ago, i went out to dinner with a friend. At dinner, he tells me about this dr. Tom. Dr. Tom is a doctor in the area between sudan and south sudan and he is the only doctor within a 1500mile radius. He does everything from deliver babies to pulling teeth appendectomy, hes everything. Hes it. And we kind of go on throughout this dinner talking about him. So i did what a curious individual does after he gets home after having a couple glasses of wine and nice dinner with a friend. I flipped open my laptop and opened up an article about him. And i come to learn about his situation and his situation is that the government of sudan, led by president bashir, is running a campaign of terror on the people of the mountains. He flies turboprop planes over this region and rolls 55 gallon drums filled with jet fuel and shrapnel out of the back. Thats what he does. And he does this is a meaning, a military tactic. Because if you drive the people out, when the military comes in there is nobody to fight. It makes it an easy war to fight. So the people are used to this. The story went on to talk about a young boy named daniel. Daniel was out tending his familys goats. He heard the prop plane coming. He went for cover. He wrapped his arms around a tree. The bomb went off not far from him and the tree protected his body but it blew off his arms. And after i think it was eight hours he finally got to dr. Tom. Dr. Tom stitched him up. When he woke he said, if i could die, i would have. Because now im going to be such a burden to my family. Im sitting at my kitchen table. I got my lap top and glass of water getting ready for bed. I look down the hallway where these three knuckleheads sleep. And i couldnt imagine if youre a parren, could you imagine if your son or daughter woke up and said i wish i was dead because ill be such a pain in the ass to mom and dad now . That was the moment for me. That was the all right. I got to do something. Im not quite sure what but i got to do something. So you commit and then figure it out. Repeat. Youll see a trend here. Invite a bunch of people to my house who make me feel stupid, brilliant people. People that work in 3d printing manufacturing fabrication. We try printing with 3d printers ballsa wood, all types of different things. The weekend was a Great Success if you measure success by everything that fails because we didnt come up with one thing that worked. The ticket was bought to sudan. There was no turning back. This guy had successfully built a hand for himself and he said i can tell you got that glint in your eyes. Youre not bailing on this trip. Are you . I said no. Hes like, all right. Come out to south africa on your way to sudan. Route through jones jones. Ill get you started. I flew to sudan to his house. Slept on his floor and ate his food and we spent six straight nights 24 hours a day just going, going going. Testing hands, testing arms. Learning how to work with prosthetics. I had never successfully 3d printed until that point. We basically came to the end and successfully made a prototype. And i bid his family farewell and hopped on a plane to juba and then a prop lean to the refugee camp. It was there that i met daniel for the first time. Our plan was to meet daniel. It was a nervous experience because the whole thing is called project daniel. I never talked to the kid. I didnt know what we were going to do. We were dealing with other people. I wanted to look him in the eye. We got there and the plan was to load up the trucks after meeting him and start our journey. Its about a ninehour journey from the refugee camp across the border of sudan. Wed be going under the protection of the rebels spla and wed cross under the cover of night to get to dr. Tom where we would start our process. There is a rub. The rub is the ceasefire ended while we were in the air from johannesburg to sudan. So security came in and said, im sorry. You cant go. We cant guarantee you safe passage so your a he not going. So, luckily an n. G. O. Found out about us and said, hey. Come on over. Weve got this shed in the bag. If you want to set up shop there while we sort sort you before you go to uncle tom, jump on it. We went over there and set up the printers and started making the casts daniel would use for his forearms to replace where his arm used to be. We played with the ergonomics of the elbow and started the making. There is a saying i learned there called t. I. A. Which is, this is africa which is the equivalent of murphys law which im an optimist and i kind of discounted and i got my ass handed to me right quick as soon ace got there and experienced this. Because if it could go wrong it did. The electricity was wrong. We had to rewire electricity. It was so hot during the day that the 3d printing filament that we had was melting to itself before it even got into my printer where its supposed to melt and then print out something. So it was one thing after another after another. Eventually we got to november 11, and this is what happened. There is this thing in me that loves to see things that are supposed to not be done be done. Daniel is just one of 50,000 amputees left in the wake of the ploodiest war africa has ever known. We heard of an active war zone in sudan and flew there with three printers, lap tops, spools of plastic, and the goal to build daniel an arm. You ready . The concept of project daniel was hatched july 11. On november 11, daniel fed himself for the first time in two years. But its never about just one person. If we could teach the locals to do it themselves then project daniel could live on long after we left. And it did. [applause] thank you. Ive seen that video probably thousands of times and i still get that grin when he gets up and tries to throw. So what were doing around project daniel, and everything were doing around project daniel is around this concept of technology for the sake of humanity. Were creating inventions like the eye writer that was comparabley was 15 grand that we made for a hundred dollars. Were making devices, e. E. G. Tracking devices that allow people with syndromes to communicate using their brain waves and eyes. The project daniel arm we were able to make that was able to do something arms are 15 grand up to a hundred grand and we were able to make it for a hundred dollars. So, for us, this is the philosophy of making using technology for the sake of humanity. This is the philosophy of how do you take something and make it so it accomplishes a fundamental social need . So the question that we ask and we ask everybody here is, lets not try to cure malaria. Lets try for sure but if i ask you right now in this room would you guys want to help me cure malaria, yeah, sure mick. If i say lets go help jim. Lets go help jane. Lets go help suzy there is this philosophy of helping one person. And then making that available to many people afterwards. Making it open source, accessible. Thats where the power lies. One of our mantras is help one help many. So the question that i would ask you guys today is, who is your one . Who is your one . Based on what you just saw, who is your daniel . Thank you guys. [applause] thank you. Thank you. If mapping the human genome was one of the biggest scientific victories of the last decade comprehensively mapping the human brain is the new goal for this one. Our next speakers are two neuro scientists at the forefront of the effort to discover how the brain works, how genetics makeup controls memory, emotions, attention, and even hunger. Please welcome jacopo aness, director of the brain observatory and allan jones the c. E. O. Of the Allan Institute for Brain Science along with the atlantic Senior Editor jim hamblin, himself a doctor. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. A lot of you probably know last year the federal government announced something called the Brain Initiative, which dedicates somewhere between 300 and 500 million to mapping the human brain. Were lucky to have a few scientists here today who are working on similar projects trying to figure out exactly whats going on in our brains, which is no small task, but an incredibly fascinating and important one. I want to start at the very top and just get to simple but also very complex question of what are we talking about when we say brain mapping . Yes. So let me talk about what we often talk about at the Allan Institute for Brain Science which, by the way, is not named for me but rather for paul allan, one of the cofounders of microsoft. We often think of it as if i have a Samsung Phone here but imagine that this is a new iphone 6 and i work for samsung, our big challenge would be how does this thing work . And imagine, this is something you can all relate to, what would you do, and they do this, very common in industry. You take it apart. You start to look at the chip architecture. They pop these chips out. They put them in an electron microscope app look at all the individual parts. Thats only the start. If all you knew was that architecture to tell you something about the advantages one phone had over another, you also need to turn it on, figure out how the software works. Theres probably new a new operating system you need to start to dig into, how that information is coded. Then you need to understand the new apps and how those work on top of that. So there are these levels of the components, the computation, and ultimately in the human brain cognition, those apps that are running that we all need to understand. So when we think about brain mapping, we think about all of those different elements and how they come together. So in some way our brains are almost as complex as our phones. And almost, yes. There is a caveat. The work that we do at the brain observatory is try to catalog different cell phones. So the problem is once you map one cell phone, once you reverse engineer one cell phone if you in reality were not like the same model, you know. Were not all samsung. Even if we were the same brand we would be very different. So each brain i brought mine. I brought a spare. I almost forgot it in the hotel room. Even at this level this is just a 3d print of my brain and shows the con voleution. Even at this level if i printed your brain it would be very different. When you zoom in and look at connections and cells and, you know, even sin apps is and the architecture of the brain at the microscopic level all bets are off. So really we have a project called the Digital Brain library. Not the digital cell library. We catalog brains from individuals who donate them to science. We create cellular resolution maps. One day when we know the basic architecture of one particular brain of a particular species then we can look at individual differences which is really what im very interested in is why i am who i am, how much has that to do with the brain . How similar we are if we make the same choices in life. How are we differently susceptible to disease as well . So we have the federal grant initiative. We have the Allen Institute, the brain observatory. Weve been cutting open brains for a long time. Weve been study neuroscience for a long time. Whats different right now . Why do we have all of these initiatives to map the brain . What is allowing us to do that . Whats driving this . I guess i would say for those who dont know the ail ensigns tsustumi Allen Institute for Brain Science has been around for 10 years and 2 1 2 years ago paul announced a major new niche tiff, which ultimately will commit almost a billion dollars of his own money to an ambitious project that goes after the components and the computation of the brain. A year later, there was a large european effort that was announced. This was a 1. 3 billion euro investment. Then the Brain Initiative announcement came soon thereafter. Probably any day now i have heard there will be one from china, a japan announced their Brain Initiative earlier. So theres a lot of people converging on this. The question one might ask is why . There is certainly an urgency around understanding human brain disease but i think its also a really interesting time in history and convergence around a lot of new technologies developed over the last many years. Things like at ability to actually manipulate the firing of the neuron with light. There are advances in microscopey that allow you to get a very High Resolution image. There are advancings in being able to see the brain firing in real time. I liken this to a hundred years ago there was this unfolding of the language of chemistry. In a very short period of time, lots of very fundamentals were established. Fast forward 50 years with the discovery of dna. We had the language of life that unfolded. And so now here we are 50 years from now. I dont think this is a bold prediction if you look at where people are putting the money. I think we will have some understanding of language of the brain in the next decade with all of these efforts. Its a really exciting time. Is it good there are all of these different efforts and countries and institutions or should everybody be working together on one giant initiative . Internationally its a challenge to combine goals. It is even a challenge within a Single Institution especially an academic institution. Labs work independently. At the national level. We compete for funding between each other. It would be great to have, we were talking before backstage, would be great to have as we suggested an initiative that would be just like where all the scientists got together and decided thats what we really need to understand. We would like to understand that spark in our brain, what makes us human. I think neuro scientists are not unlike even physicists should be less social than neuro scientists you would think but they manage actually to get together and do this. I like the fact that the Brain Initiative really made people think about the brain more. In my experience with the brain library because we know the participants, the patients, we know the person behind the brain, i understood over the years without Public Engagement there cannot be neuroscience. We cannot study the human brain if people dont lend themselves to go in for a scan. Even at the very basic level. 20 minutes of their time. If people didnt care about the brain, not that we pay them. We dont pay them. Some studies pay 20 bucks to go in for an hour or so. But Public