Dr. Divya Chander is a physician, neuroscientist, and (a total badass) futurist who trained at Harvard, UCSD, UCSF, and the Salk Institute. In the operating room, Dr. Chander applies EEG technology to understand what human brains look like when they lose and regain consciousness, and has recently developed a precision medicine initiative at Stanford aimed at understanding genetic variability in responses to anesthetic drugs.
Her postdoctoral training in optogenetic technology was conducted at Stanford, where she used light-activated ion channels inserted in DNA to study sleep and consciousness switches in brains. Her goal is to understand the neural mechanisms of consciousness, as well as the evolution of human consciousness secondary to human augmentation.
She is currently working on applications of neural wearable devices to crossover consumer and medical markets. She also works in the field of space life sciences and is involved with a consortium that elaborated a road-map for studying the effect of microgravity and radiation on the nervous system, cardiovascular system, cognition and sleep.
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Consciousness, Drugs, & Brain Upgrades: Anesthesiologist Neuroscientist Divya Chander #547
Links/Resources
Website: su.org
Linkedin: linkedin.com/divyachander/
TED Archive: Asking where consciousness comes from
MedTech: Divya Chander | SingularityU South Africa
Show Notes
- How do you study consciousness? 00:07:20
- What electrodes can tell us about brains 00:09:45
- How to quantify consciousness or enlightenment 00:12:40
- Defining consciousness 00:13:20
- Deploying brain-machine interfaces 00:16:10
- Do EMFs harm mitochondria 00:19:10
- Delivering energy from the outside 00:20:35
- How Ketamine works on brain waves 00:23:25
- “I encourage people who are using drugs to measure their brain waves” 00:24:30
- Upgrading or repairing the human brain 00:27:30
- You can actually improve working memory 00:28:25
- Can you biohack your epigenome and pass it along to your kids 00:31:50
- What happens when you start to edit genomes 00:33:25
- When technology is powerful, people try to hold onto it 00:40:15
- “I don’t want people to sit back and assume technology is going to develop the right way” 00:44:20
- How to get around an “N of 1” 00:52:40
- The reproducibility of scientific studies 00:55:05
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