I live in Boston and spend a lot of time in SF (where I’m very familiar with the culture). My overwhelming interest is in brain health and neuromodulation - however - I am broadly interested in everything (esp complexity). I am a Venture Fellow at Healthspan Capital.
📚 Books| 📧 Email | 🐦 Twitter | Quora
More me: Bluesky · Facebook · Twitter scrape dataset (public posts) | **email me** · join the Discord · Twitter · Quora · Linktree
🦜 Alex K. Chen — catalytic stochastic cockatoo
I sit at the periphery of everything — high betweenness-centrality, trading on the strength of weak ties. AI is making the illegible legible; this page is where I lean into that.
I am friends with many in augmentationlab.org and the directorysf.com grouphouses. I helped catalyze the early formation of a major SF grouphouse and catalyzed the early-stage life trajectories and careers of many.
The attention residual. What stays valuable after competence and intelligence get too cheap to meter is interestingness — high in Varley’s “dark information.” That residual is what this whole page is about.
I create neurofeedback apps for better modulating drowsy brainwaves from openbci cyton to better brain states. My main passion (beyond breadth/serendipity/”why diversity is all you need”) is about using all the methods/modalities to make the human brain suck less (important for getting the brain to properly adapt to AI).
(the first iteration is here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edubaem_hardmode-hardmode-ugcPost-7436769050816344064-0vcY/).
A next iteration is this (though online demo uses synthetic data and not-real-time EEG data):
🌌 Aurora — live neurofeedback demo — 2-channel EEG driving generative music and visuals in a closed loop. Alpha reward, peak alpha frequency, aperiodic (χ) exponent, EMG artifact gating that freezes feedback rather than lying to you, and a small RL loop that learns which pitch/light combinations work for you. Runs in a browser; demo mode needs no headset.
📝 Remote Music Neurofeedback Session Report — written up for Resolution Hacks at Harvard. Built with Eduardo Baena at Northeastern, via mindfulmakers.xyz.
🔬 Everything I've Built and Tried — the running list, including the things that didn't work.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1T6RQxRSaueAYCeriZSAYlwb7tCBAy-zU?usp=drive_link (a followup of the hardmode.mit.edu hackathon)
I analyze longitudinal changes of a MRI dataset over time (eg pial area, surface area), matching it to EEG data.