Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

So today, this isn't a particular unique point in that, that there have always been troubles.

There have always been wars.

There have always been people that suffered.

But what's so different is the cynicism and the belief, well, it's part of the system.

There's nothing we can do about it.

And so you wonder where this culture is in its natural evolution.

Yeah, so this was 20 years ago, roughly, when I was a professor here at Caltech.

And I worked with a group of a neurosurgeon called Isaac Fried at UCLA Epileptic Unit.

So he had to monitor people's brain for epileptic seizure.

And in some of these patients, they put in electrodes to listen to individual neurons.

So you can hear the, you know, the staccato sound.

sound that neurons make when they communicate with each other using action potential.

And so this afforded us a very unique window into actually listening to a human brain when humans do what they do in the world.

They watch movies or, you know, they're bored.

They have to wait.

They have to be on a ward in this state where their brain is monitored for a couple of days until they have seizures to help

The neurologists pinpoint exactly where the seizure originates.

So this is done to help these patients.

And so Rodrigo Quiroga was a postdoc at the time in my lab and Gabriel Kreiman, who's now at Harvard.

He was a student in my lab.