r/BCI

I'm currently a junior in high school located in the Bay Area, California, and am particularly interested in going into neurotech jobs that involve BCIs, technology, and the brain. I would love to work with companies that bridge human consciousness and tech through implants, specifically being able to help build them or code them

However, my profile so far is mainly aimed at neuroscience and data science instead of engineering and biology, and is fairly weak compared to other students at my school aiming to get into t20s for engineering. This summer, I already have some computational biology research, EEG/Brain programs, and other neuroscience/bio-related programs lined up to try to shift my focus into the neurotech field, but I'm not sure if I'm preparing myself the right way.

I was wondering whether I should pick EE, BioE, BiomedicalE, Neuroscience, Cog sci, or any other combination as my major when applying to colleges. The problem is that if I were to apply to good schools (Berkeley, LA, SD, USC) for EE or Compsci, I would have a near 0 chance, but if I went for BioE (Bit easier) or neuroscience (much easier), I would have a higher chance and thus get my degree from a better school. My parents are immigrants (Indian), and they are totally freaked out by the "small and bare" job market that would come right after college with a major in neuroscience or bioE, and want me to go to a mid school for EE or MechE. I was also thinking that I could minor in EE, but I'm not sure how that works.

My overall goal is to potentially work in Neurotech with a master's or a bachelor's, so I'm torn on which path to pick. Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.

Scientists at Eon Systems just uploaded a real fruit fly brain potentially conscious in its digital form! Using the FlyWire connectome (139k neurons, 50M synapses), Philip Shiu's team built a neuron-by-neuron sim in Brian2 that plugs into a virtual body via MuJoCo. It walks in gaits, grooms antennae with perfect sync, and fixes posture emerging from wiring alone, no scripts. 95% accurate vs. real flies.

If the emulation captures the essence of experience, this conscious digital fly is a wild milestone toward mind uploading

I am a first year UG student from a tier 1 college in india. Currently I am enrolled in mathematics and Computing. But I want to really pursue a career as a bci scientist. My first year will end about 2 weeks from now and i really wish to make significant progress and learn about this in the summer break of about 2.5 months.

Please help me and guide me what and how to do it.

If you had to buy a BCI for your day to day what would it be?

When Synchron announced Chiral at NVIDIA GTC earlier this year, the technical detail was fairly light, but the interesting thing wasn't the technology anyway. It was what the announcement said about how implantable BCI companies are starting to think about the data they've been collecting for years.

Every serious implant programme is sitting on years of high-quality intracortical recordings, which is training data for a foundation model whether or not the company has said so publicly. Synchron was the first to say it out loud. Neuralink hasn't announced anything yet but the data is accumulating.

I've been trying to make sense of what brain foundation models actually are and where this is heading, and I wrote a piece this week that covers the companies building in this space that don't get talked about much in the wider conversation, Piramidal, Brainify, Hemispheric, Constellation Systems, Alljoined, and Arctop, as well as the data ownership question that nobody has cleanly answered yet.

I'm a recruiter in neurotech rather than a researcher, so take the technical framing with a pinch of salt. But I'd genuinely like to know how the BCI community thinks about who owns the model that gets trained on implant data, and what that means as these programmes scale.

The article I wrote is in the comments, would love any ideas on it