I don't know if it is going to work out as well as 2013's "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford?"—which was followed by 2014's Deep Learning is VC Worthy—which was followed by 2015 to date "Saaaay, this Nvidia may be on to something."
But we shall see.
From Top 1000 Funds, September 20:
How science is literally changing how we see the world
Breakthroughs in understanding the function of the brain have opened up a host of possibilities for expanding humanity’s perception of the world around us – and investable commercial opportunities are following the Fiduciary Investors Symposium at Stanford heard.
Humanity is on the cusp of being able to choose how it interacts with the physical world, raising the possibility that science can creating new senses for humans that will radically change how we perceive our cosmos.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman, adjunct professor in the Pysch/Public Mental Health and Population Sciences department of Stanford University, says every living organism has what’s known as “umwelt” – or the way in which it perceives the world around it.
Eagleman told the Top1000funds.com Fiduciary Investors Symposium at Stanford on Tuesday that our interaction with the physical world is constrained by our biology. Our eyes, for example, convert photons into electrical signals, and the biology of the eye means it is receptive to only a small portion of the light spectrum. Eagleman says the colors we can perceive are only about one ten-trillionth of the available spectrum – which includes, microwaves, radio waves, x-rays, and gamma rays.
Eagleman’s insight is that the human brain is fundamentally a receptor of electrical signals, and that it doesn’t matter where the brain gets its those signals from, it will always be able to process them into something that enables us to interact with the physical world. But even though we think we see or hear the world around us, “the whole secret is you your brain is not directly hearing or seeing [anything]”, Eagleman says.
“Your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside the vault of your skull and all your brain ever experiences are electrochemical signals running around in the dark,” he says.
“And that it turns out the brain is really good at this, at figuring out patterns and extracting information this way, and eventually building your entire subjective cosmos out of that.
“The key point I want to make is that your brain doesn’t know and doesn’t care where the data come from, because whether that’s photons getting captured in these spheres in your skull, or air compression waves getting picked up on your vibrating eardrum, or pressure or temperature on your fingertips, it all gets converted to spikes – just these little electrical signals that are running around. And it all looks the same in the brain.”....
....MUCH MORE
