Reverse engineering the brain?

In a recent invited talk at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Lloyd Watts, neuroscientist turned entrepreneur (founder, chairman and CTO of Audience Inc., a Silicon Valley company that commercializes technology derived from auditory neuroscience research), presented his “strategy” on how to go about a gargantuan task: reverse-engineering the brain. With a military strategy analogy, the problem is the following: what is the best way to occupy an enemy territory? Should the invading army occupy simultaneously the target territory from all its borders, or should all troops focus on a narrow strip of land, occupy it, consolidate the territory and exploit its resources, and then move on to the next target? Lloyd Watts, the neuroscientist-entrepreneur, seems to suggest that the second strategy is the winning one.

Watts has leveraged decades of very detailed research in the field of auditory neuroscience to build a chip that replicates the main functions of the primary auditory pathways. His company has been able to engineer a chip, of the dimension of a few square millimeters, that is now beginning to be shipped by major mobile phone manufacturers in several different models.

What does the chip do? Using proprietary core technology based on the processing steps believed to be implemented in the animal hearing system, and two microphones that mimic the animal binaural auditory system, the chip is able to deliver robust noise suppression, dramatically improving the voice quality by separating the voice of the speaker from noise sources in the caller’s environment, such as restaurant noise, car noise, or music and background conversations. The claim is that the chip is able to achieve this performance by faithfully mimicking the functional properties of the early auditory pathways. But this is not the point of this editorial…

The point is not the “what” Watts and his company is doing, but the “how” this team is approaching the issue of reverse-engineering the brain. The strategy is the following: take a very well understood system (such as the primary auditory pathway), extract its fundamental computations and implement it in software/hardware fast enough to run in real time and cope with real-world constraints. Then, use this knowledge to realize a commercially viable product that would sustain revenues while a longer term strategy of reverse engineering even more “brain tissue” is undertaken. This is fundamentally different from the approach of other government, academic and industry groups: try to tackle the global problem in hope of gaining large rewards with no regard to the smaller components that may be give more immediate payoffs. The next few years will tell…