Two magic moments at the Future of the Brain Summit at UCSF 🧠
1) Lunch with Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna (CRISPR Cas9)
2) Seeing a Parkinson’s patient with uncontrollable tremor flip a switch to turn on his DBS, and suddenly regain complete motor control, standing up from his wheelchair to walk off stage.
Another patient regained the capacity for speech from a rectangular brain patch implanted between the skull and cortex, interpreted by a recurrent neural net trained on his activation patterns with a set of words (moving from 50 initially to 1000, which would cover 95% of routine communication). He addressed us: “Hola, my name is Pancho. These are my words. Welcome to the future of my brain.”
30 years ago, we had no cures and there was little excitement to enter the field because there were no treatment options. Many of the talks showed how that has changed recently, with an array of new treatments from transcranial magnetic stimulation to focused ultrasound to deep brain stimulator pacemakers to psychedelics.
Dementia has tripled in the past 30 years. Working on early detection. 1/3 of AD could be prevented or delayed in the 50’s. We are just starting the war on neuro-degenerative diseases.
Aging: Klotho is a natural hormone made by the kidneys that makes us smarter and slows aging. It is a longevity hormone governing aging and cognitive resilience. 20% of people have a genetic predisposition to having higher levels of klotho. Chronic stress lowers it dramatically. They have found they can boost klotho levels with a belly shot. In mouse studies, the klotho shots made them resilient to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s toxins, increasing the resiliency of the brain and doubling their memory. The effect size is the same as APOE4 increasing the risk of Alzheimer’s, but in the other direction (3x reduction). Klotho does not cross the blood-brain-barrier, but it activates platelet production, which releases bioactive factors that cross into the brain and improve cognition. This was very surprising.
Sleep: The human body can survive longer without food than it can without sleep. People who get less than 6 hours of sleep are 4x as likely to get sick from the common cold. Advice: regular schedule, even weekends. Get sunlight during day. Avoid screens and alcohol before bed.
More details in each photo caption.
• Agenda: https://specialevents.ucsf.edu/futurebrain
• Speaker Bios: https://specialevents.ucsf.edu/futurebrain-speakers
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