My friend Daniel Levitin wrote "This Is Your Brain on Music." My

My friend Daniel Levitin wrote "This Is Your Brain on Music." My friend J. Galen Buckwalter might one day write "This Is Music on Your Brain". Galen is making music with his brain! A diving accident left him paralyzed from the chest down at 16. And finally in 2024, he signed up in 2024 for a brain implant study at Caltech, and now he has six Blackrock Neurotech chips in his brain reading his neurons. Originally these implants were about restoring movement and sensation, but Galen had a different idea from day one: he'd seen a video of mushrooms being turned into sound through electrodes and thought, if a mushroom can chirp, I want to hear what my brain sounds like. Siggy, his punk band of 29 years, has already put one of his neural compositions on their new album, released in March 2026 on a track fittingly called "Wirehead." See https://lnkd.in/gjixzmVZ The team is working on building toward something like a full DJ setup powered entirely by his thoughts. BCI research has been too focused on pure function, and not enough on what actually makes people want to live with this technology. He's basically arguing that joy, creativity, and subjective experience need to drive the field forward, because "people have to love the experience of it." He talks about the awe of watching his own neurons fire on a screen, the creative flow state he leaves sessions in, the thrill of doing something entirely new in the world.

https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-man-making-music-with-his-brain-implant/

https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/0452288525