Billionaire Bryan Johnson excites neurons and investors

The goal is a ‘Fitbit’ for your brain that costs no more than a smartphone.

Bryan Johnson wearing the Kernel Flow helmet he believes may change the way we understand the mind, and perhaps even allow us to repair the brain.

A lab technician turns a knob near the back of my neck, tightening on to my skull a helmet packed with enough lasers to make a Storm Trooper jealous. “How’s that feel?” he says.

Honestly, kind of strange. Atop my cranium is the Kernel Flow, a bulky array of modules that is about to bombard my brain with photons. The strange-looking ­device took five years and more than $US50m of the personal cash of tech tycoon Bryan Johnson to ­develop.

Think of it as an MRI machine – those coffin-like monstrosities you see in medical dramas where patients lay perfectly still while it images their insides – shrunk down to a helmet that provides a live video of what is happening in your brain by analysing blood flow and oxygenation.

Johnson made his fortune when he sold his payments start-up, Braintree, for $1.15bn to PayPal in 2013. Online payments make life easier. But Kernel? He reckons that it could, quite literally, change the world. “This really is about the future of being human,” Johnson said.

Stay with him, here. Johnson’s argument is that the brain is one of the last few things “in the known universe” that cannot be measured routinely. He envisions ­Kernel as a consumer device, a kind of Fitbit for the mind that will change that.

There is precedent. He points to genome mapping, which went from billions of dollars a time to a couple of hundred, or building-sized mainframe computers shrinking to a smartphone. He plans to start selling Kernel’s Flow device at “smartphone prices” by 2024 and that it will soon become ubiquitous.

Outlandish though it may sound, Johnson reckons that ­Kernel is about to catalyse the ­creation of a new tech platform, based on neural measurement, that will seed a universe of products the same way that, say, Apple created the app economy when it invented the iPhone.

“We want to reduce the complexity to a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’. Is this good for my brain? Is this bad for my brain?” Johnson said. “If we are successful, it would alter how we understand ourselves and each other, it would change the ecosystem of Earth and our collective future. I think it would be that big.”

Imagine if an educational video game carried a “brain safe” badge after being tested with Kernel’s tech. Perhaps Nike could use it to optimise training for top athletes. Or you could see what that nightcap, or an hour on Instagram, is doing to your grey matter in real time.

Johnson is not alone in his ­enthusiasm for decoding the brain. A mini-industry has emerged in recent years around brain-computer interfaces. The best known is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is building a brain surgery robot to drill a hole in the skull and sew in thousands of polymer threads connected to a chip. The goal in the near term is to restore function to ­severely disabled people. Longer term? Musk reckons we will merge with machines and ­“secure the ­future of humanity relative to AI”. The very large ­hurdle in his way, of course, is that no one wants brain surgery.

Johnson’s goal is to make mind measurement mainstream, which is why after exploring brain ­implants he alighted on the non-invasive approach. And for him, it is personal.

Johnson suffered chronic depression for a decade. His father struggled with addiction, his stepfather is in the late stages of cognitive decline. “Having something that would give further insight into what we could do to improve our mental state is really compelling to me,” he said.

Johnson, 44, grew up Mormon in Utah, did a two-year mission for the church in Ecuador and started launching businesses after university. He is a serious person who seems acutely aware of the challenge that he, as a non-scientist, has undertaken, but is unbending in his mission and, like many other tech entrepreneurs, unironic in his conviction that his invention could change the world. This ­ultimate goal is to translate the vague workings of our minds into universally understood markers, hard data upon which, “the architecture of society, from school, to our self-improvement, to our ­relationships to politics and economics” will be rebuilt.

When he sold Braintree, ­Johnson was in his mid-30s, a ­father of three and suddenly, wildly wealthy. At a crossroads, the avid reader of biographies drew ­inspiration from Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. Johnson keeps two tattered, original volumes of Shackleton’s journals from his voyage on the ill-fated Endurance in his office bookcase. “It was either go on a Shackleton-like voyage, or go to the mountains and have a small farm. Right in the middle just didn’t make sense to me.”

He chose the former. He hired 100 people, all on his own dime. They filed more than 200 patents on everything from proprietary ­lasers to chips and sensors as they sought to miniaturise a room-sized medical device into a consumer wearable. Last year, the company raised $75m – its first outside funding – to scale up production and keep shrinking the device. Johnson said: “It’s been one of the most difficult companies in the world I can imagine to build.”

At Kernel’s warehouse-style headquarters in Culver City, California, they strap to my head the result of all that toil, and have me play a simple video game that ­involves shooting orbs as they ­appear on a computer screen. While I click away, the Kernel Flow is blasting my grey matter with pulses of photons and interpreting how they bounce back. The patterns change based on blood that flows to the most active parts of the brain. The result is a real-time, 3D video of the nooks and crannies lighting up as I play.

The company has several dozen prototypes out in the wild, mostly with researchers looking at everything from meditation to concussions. Commercial partners include Cybin, a biopharmaceuticals company, and Aim Lab, which trains professional gamers and designed the simple shooting game I tried.

Kernel has come a long way, but has much, much further to go. The pulsing brain images it generates are no doubt data-rich and, to a non-expert, arresting. But turning that data into insights or ­actions will take some doing. Katherine Purdue, Kernel’s head of neuroscience, went through my brain data from the experiment. She showed me how my left motor precortex lit up, which is typical when using your right hand to click a mouse. The back of my brain was also glowing, as this is where visual and motion processing takes place.

The question, however, is: so what? What value judgments or actions can one take based on a glowing brain?

“If you’re in academia, if you have a pretty map like this, you are done,” Purdue said. “But when it comes to thinking of a commercial application, you need to be thinking about, how are people going to use this? How are people going to find this valuable?

“We’re not yet at the point where it’s a consumer-level app that’s ready for you in your house. Instead, we are ­gathering data about how these patterns of brain activity are linked to these other things that are ­actionable.”

Johnson is undeterred by the haziness of Flow’s future.

He harks back to Shackleton. “I admire endeavours that, in their time and place, look at the horizon of human opportunity, of the thing that could be attempted, and they choose to do that thing, despite the odds.”

Shackleton died on his last ­Antarctic voyage. “He never made it,” said Johnson. “It’s not a story about success. It’s a story about what one does on the journey, after identifying that point on the horizon.”

The Sunday Times