Christopher deCharms

Talk Description

Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms is helping to develop a new kind of MRI that allows doctor and patient to look inside the brain in real time — to see visual representations of brain processes as they happen. With his company Omneuron, deCharms developed technology called rtfMRI ('real-time functional MRI'). You move your arm, your brain lights up; you feel pain, your brain lights up. He asks: how could we use the ability to see our brains in action? For a start, to help treat chronic pain with biofeedback. Ours is the first generation, he believes, able to train and build our minds as systematically as a weightlifter builds a muscle. What will we do with this?

Biography

Christopher deCharms is a neuroscientist, serial entrepreneur, author, inventor and founder of Omneuron, a life sciences company focusing on real-time functional MRI (rtfMRI) technologies allowing patients, physicians and researchers to visualize and control brain function non-invasively. He began his research career in neurophysiology at the Kick Center for Integrative Neuroscience, recording patterns of brain activation to explore perception, experience and learning. His team's research on rtfMRI-based training, in which subjects learn to control patterns of activation in their own brains via real-time fMRI feedback while viewing virtual reality goggles inside the scanner, has been published in the scientific literature and covered in The New York Times, BBC, NPR, Wired, and Technology Review.