Brainthrough 6 months in

Hello from Sydney,

When I started the newsletter last year, I set myself a milestone to review the progress made, understand what worked and what did not, and adapt accordingly.

I was also pretty sure, that I will learn more about the dynamics of the neuroscience / neurotech / management overlap.

Almost 6 months in, here is what will change:

Your TL;DR - going forward, I will change from writing twice a week to once a week, combining my Thursday deep-dives with my Lazy Sundays.

Why?

Honestly, because some topics require a bit more time to research from a management and leadership perspective. I can better connect and describe the research done, e.g. during Lazy Sundays. As a result, some newsletter editions will become more themed.

Secondly, I realized that while there is plenty of research done and news produced weekly, not all of it is groundbreaking and usable, beyond being another stepping stone for future research. And I don’t want this to become a medical newsletter. 🩺 👨‍⚕️ But I will look more detailed into Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Autism and ADHD.

Thirdly, I spoke to some of you over the last couple of weeks. Common feedback was to provide more actionable (and shorter, yes!) content. I appreciate all the feedback from you, this is a further attempt to get the direction right.

Last but not least, this year has brought up requests from founders, investors, accelerators and companies, where I can utilize the content from my newsletter journey in trainings, mentorships, and other consulting projects. It would be stupid not to take it up and distribute the learnings beyond this publication. Right?

So what’s next?

I will continue to focus on neuroscience, neurotech in combination with management and leadership (performance). I am even more excited about the future of neurotech than I was when I started.

The newsletter will now land once a week and become more thematic at times.

While I will write the majority, I have plans to bring on guest-writers and share interviews with thought leaders. This will start sometime during the 2nd half of the year. Yikes!!!

On to the next 6 months.

Thank you all for your support!

Not entirely the end: some more learnings

What a growth experience newslettering is

Writing a newsletter is probably the single most low-barrier entry point to get stuff done. Once you share it with the world, there is no going back (well, there is, but comes with ego-price).

This commitment is such a personal growth lever for every newsletter writer I have spoken to!

Distribution is more than half the job

Newsletters don’t grow themselves. I wish they would! Nobody will know about it if I don’t share and market it. Sales is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable means growth, both, on a personal side and the newsletter. Nice dopamine bumps. 🤗

Neurotech is more regulated than I thought (and not enough)

And this definitely slows down the release of new products. There could be so many of them. But distributing brain-tech has a larger social impact than distributing heart rate monitors because the data collected can uncover much more information about the individual (thoughts, stress etc). I really underestimated that.

AI can actually be helpful but not prime time ready

Both for the creation of content, but also within the field itself. Current AI models, e.g. for image generation, are trained on similar data, hence produce similar results unless you prompt the 😈 out of it. This is one of the reasons I haven’t used more images in the newsletter. I can not copy paste images from websites easily (copyright) but AI-generators create images that look like, well, AI-generated. Not fully enticing.

Neuroscience as ground for AI

There is more neuroscience in AI research than we give credit to. From chip design, to new, improved neural networks. In return, AI helps neuroscience research through improved modelling and data-analysis. This circle will speed up our knowledge.

Take care!

Alex