Your brain mediates everything you sense, feel, think, and do -- and acts as your ultimate 'neuromedia' interface to the world. A challenge for humanity is to understand the brain at a level of abstraction that enables us to engineer its function -- repairing pathology, augmenting cognition, and revealing insights into the human condition.
We are inventing new tools for analyzing and engineering brain circuits. We are devising technologies for controlling specific neural circuit elements, to understand their causal contribution to normal and pathological neural computations. Our inventions include 'optogenetic' tools we developed for activation and silencing of neural circuits with light, and noninvasive devices using novel physical principles to control neural activity.
We are using our inventions to enable systematic approaches to neuroscience, revealing how entire neural circuits operate to generate behavior, and empowering new therapeutic strategies for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Our entrepreneurial approach to tackling clinically and philosophically important problems will hopefully yield a better understanding of the nature of human existence, and enable the ability to engineer improvements thereupon.
News
- National Eye Institute 40th Anniversary Symposium, "Translational Research and Vision" (NIH, 6/24/2010)
- Learning How the Brain Works (NSF ScienceLives, 6/2/2010)
- Neuroscience: Illuminating the brain (Nature, 5/6/2010)
- Want to support research on new technologies for tackling neural disorders? Donate to the Neurotechnology Fund (3893630).
- Light Switch (Technology Review, 5/1/2010)
- Laser Show and ‘Big Ideas’ kick off 2010 Cambridge Science Festival (MIT News, 4/20/2010)
- Optogenetics: controlling brain cells with lasers (New Scientist, 1/7/2010)
- Video of Boyden lecture at New York City "Singularity Summit" (11/01/09)













