Buried in a dark block of the mission district, this gem of a space granted wishes I hadn't yet thought to have. Within an hour of arriving I was soldering connections putting together a persistence of vision kit of LEDs with a microcontroller and chatting casually with peers working on robots and 3-D printers. What happened to me that I was so unaware of the possibilities of today? I dont need to publish and pump out dry overly analytical and ego massaging reports and papers with the hope that my ideas may one day be tested. With what is available for cents to dollars anyone can sit, plan, and build almost anything imaginable! So between February and May, I got through it all by giving myself time at hackerspaces, for every purely conceptual idea I pumped out in a paper, report or epic problem set, I would retreat to noisebridge soon as I could, and build something fun, interesting or just plain silly. It was good, so fun and I found myself solving physics problems in more 'interesting' ways as well as reflecting on the nature of the electromagnetic landscape we dwell across. So now.. Today. October 2012 I finished university, and I am applying all the fantastic and curious ideas I have come across in my research and reading. Now I am making something of the passion I put into every topic I took on. By making something... quite literally some THINGS in the form of a physical and wearable devices. At this point in the infancy of Neuroscience research, anything goes. A scientist can work from whatever model of the brain/mind/body they choose to use and so long as they take care in listing variables and the paradigm from which they are working, the results can be interpretable or at least interesting. It seems that going the traditional lab scientific route in testing aspects of the sensory and neurological environment is not a very effective or fruitful except in exceptional cases and always the result of lots of funding, participating major agencies and time. To really get at aspects of our physical self that compose into self identity in experience is fringe science grounds and requires an interdisciplinary and integrated approach that is by definition somewhat off course from traditional methods. So long as my focus and interest is in the human experience, my ability to conduct interesting and relevant research will always be limited by the rigid laws governing any kind of human testing or live human research (even when noninvasive). This is probably for the best given how difficult regulation would be.
To solve this problem of how to build things that emphasize, reconnect and harmonize the human experience without actually testing them on humans seems self defeating until I realised not only am I willing to test any of my non invasive devises and tools on my self but others in my community feel the same. Talking to people about my ideas, it quickly became clear that not only are most people willing to test these things out with me, they were interested in buying them as products to play with themselves. Like a watch, cell phone, or laptop people consider even these simple scientific instruments devices, cool, wearable and integratible into their lives. Its easy for us to integrate devices with new technology into our worlds. Lets use this plasticity to tap into our capabilities and perhaps reveal an underlying architecture of the mind.
