Essays, articles, and thoughts on topics I find interesting.
Motor units fire at 8-25 Hz, yet EMG signals contain power to 500 Hz. Facial muscles show lower spectral peaks than limb muscles despite similar firing rates. I trace the complete transduction chain from motor cortex to skin surface, resolving these apparent paradoxes through muscle fibre conduction velocity, MUAP morphology, and Fourier relationships between temporal duration and spectral bandwidth.
Provisioned primates develop food washing, dental flossing, and hostage negotiation. Humans given guaranteed income don't stop working - they work differently. What six decades of evidence reveals about what happens when survival pressure relaxes.
Almost all speech BCI systems to date use the same signal processing architecture. This article walks through each stage to examine how different decoder architectures (Kalman filters, RNNs with CTC, and LLM rescoring) translate neural activity into language.
A first-principles analysis of noise sources across the neural recording chain, tracing each contribution from its atomic and subatomic origins to inform design decisions for chronic brain-computer interfaces.
Technical analysis of NEO's electrode fabrication, titanium packaging, wireless power system, and the design trade-offs that enable battery-free operation with minimal surgical invasiveness.
Technical deep-dive into Blackrock Neurotech's Utah Electrode Array manufacturing processes, covering aluminum thermomigration, anisotropic etching, SIROF coating, bilayer encapsulation, and wafer-scale production evolution.
Analysis of electrode placement strategies in brain-computer interfaces for speech restoration, examining performance tradeoffs between subdural ECoG and intracortical arrays.
A synthesis of inner speech research revealing remarkable individual variation, dual neural mechanisms, clinical implications, and breakthrough brain-computer interface applications.
A consolidation of my reading on epidural ECoG signal constraints for speech decoding.