Ariel Garten Know thyself, with a brain scanner

Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain.

And after all, we are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain.

Dan Ellsey Hello. My name is Dan Ellsey. I am 34 years old and I have cerebral palsy.

Let me introduce you now to the Beery twins, diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two.

They have been weighing heavily on my mind since I got back and this is where my post becomes serious.

Suffering from angina, Nobel died at home, of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1896.

And with all the internal regulators of my brain damaged, I felt everything simultaneously.

It was a rare gem a brain tumor, hemangioblastoma the gift that keeps on giving.

The trip was over far too quickly, but a terrible weight was on my mind by the end of the first week.

Already, a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them, and the numbers don't do it justice though.

If, God forbid, any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion, most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks.

So for example, I'm making images of you, but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain.

Audience I was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo, and that the brain cells last 80 years or so.

That's always been the case. And so all we can say, well, my neocortex, which is the part of the brain I'm interested in, has 30 billion cells.

The signals that you are seeing here are action potential, are the same signals that the neurons of my brain, of our brain, use to exchange information.

The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which as you can imagine, if you don't have an experience of it yourself, is quite a big thing to take on board.

For instance, if you happen to be a 35 year old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay.

So from this experience of my recovery, I want to share four particular aspects I call them the four C's of consciousness that helped me grow my potential mind back towards the actual mind that I work with every day.

The crew has 15 members, representing a variety of disabilities. Some have cerebral palsy, one does not have legs, another has Down s Syndrome. A sign language interpreter makes the performances accessible to people who are deaf.

And so if you looked at my brain, or any brain that's infected with a viral memetic infection like this, and compared it to anyone in this room, or anyone who uses critical thinking on a regular basis, I am convinced it would look very, very different.

And then they had to straighten out my nose, and they took these rods and shoved them up my nose and went up through my brains and felt like it was coming out the top of my head, and everybody said that it should have killed me, but it didn't, because I guess I have a high tolerance for pain.

And moving on to some applications developed by developers and researchers around the world, with robots and simple machines, for example in this case, flying a toy helicopter simply by thinking lift with your mind.