From academia to the world of start-ups: My experience as a brain scientist at Ananas
Coming from a cognitive neuroscience background I didn’t really know what to expect. Marco Lin (CSO of Ananas), whom I acquainted during my Master’s Degree at UCL, kept talking to me about this company on a mission to create a peaceful, balanced society, to empower people, by modelling subjective belief systems. I soon became interested. How could I not?
I always wanted to be part of a community that aims to make the world a better place.
The trajectory from your lab experiments and empirical results, to how they affect the world, is very blurry: we have h-indexes and impact factors, maybe a published article in Nature, but we don’t really get to see the changes, real changes. The type of change that palpably improves people’s emotional and physical wellbeing. The type of change that restores your faith in humanity.
Zeena, the saliently fatigued, young CEO, yet accompanied by a big, warm, ‘let’s do this’ smile, introduces me to the rest of the team. I feel welcome immediately.
As an academic you tend to lack life skills and get stuck in your research area bubble. But here I was on day 1, in a completely different environment, my brain thrown into the whirlpool of learning everything on the go, far outside the comfort zone of my academic bubble. Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, crypto space ethics, tools that I never knew existed (Slack, Hootsuite, etc. — mind blown). It makes you realise how big the world is. That it is actually possible to put the knowledge you have, the research you have carried out, into practice. If you have a good team, that is.
The parallel between society and the brain is a very interesting one. Society and the brain work more similarly than we would like to admit. Both the brain and society are systems; individual neurons are nodes, people are nodes. Belief propagation, virality, structure and interactions between these nodes… In my opinion having a well-functioning system comes down to resolving conflicts. Of course this means that information passing and effective communication between these nodes are vital. Society has biases, perpetuated via culture. The brain has biases, perpetuated via reinforced regularities we observe: the guiding rules of how we think the environment works. This view — society as a massive brain — was the view that allowed me to easily understand the great vision Ananas is trying to convey and realise.
As time passes, I’m adapting increasingly more to the entrepreneurial habitat — a fast-paced, inspiring, galvanizing, stimulating one — which Ananas is very representative of. Where everything is happening at once and you need to be okay with approximate knowledge, learning from your mistakes — quick on your feet, and moving forward in a more informed way at every step of the journey.
In this era of misinformation, media-induced biases, learnt helplessness and social loafing, there is hope. We are all a part of this society and we have a responsibility, not only to ourselves but also to generations yet to come. And that responsibility is to provide and establish not only constructive information in a reliable way, but more importantly a set of core beliefs on how to interact with each other and the world.
I stand by Ananas’ values in initiating this change.