Neuroscience
Illuminate how neural activity becomes conscious experience
and engineer a predictive science of thought and perception.

With AI on the horizon it is becoming increasingly urgent to better understand how the human brain works. The neuro effort at Astera is designed to help answer the questions and address the technical challenges that we believe will provide the best chance for humans to flourish in this new world.

This is Astera’s ambitious initiative to decode how patterns of neural activity across 87 billion neurons become the thoughts, perceptions, and memories that constitute conscious experience. Built on the hypothesis that the brain uses compositional architecture—combining elemental units through neural syntax—we aim to transition neuroscience from observation to engineering by reading from and writing to neural circuits at scale.

FOCUS AREAS
From this program, we hope to understand:
  • How the brain represents and manipulates objects and concepts. The more we understand how human intelligence works, the better shot we will have of creating machine intelligence. Hopefully, we will have a better shot of making it roughly aligned with human values.
  • What neural circuitry gives rise to consciousness? We currently have only a shallow understanding of consciousness. But this will become increasingly important as intelligent agents other than humans are deployed in the world. We will want to know if we are enslaving conscious beings. We will want to know that if we are ceding the future, the entities we are ceding it to are also conscious. It is also important for upload and other brain-augmentation techniques, so we can determine whether the uploaded mind remains conscious.
  • Better techniques to read and write from the brain. 
  • Ways to merge and upload consciousness. The only hope that humans stay relevant in the future is through some kind of brain augmentation or upload.