Technology & the Brain, with Gabriel Axel Montes, Ph.D. | EDB 274
Gabriel Axel Montes, Ph.D. shares his work maximizing the brain’s potential through technology.
Gabriel Axel Montes, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist, consciousness educator, leadership coach, and facilitator of personal and organizational development and transformation.
Drawing from over a decade of neuroscience and consciousness research and experience as a facilitator, Gabriel taps latent human capability to optimize processes and unlock value from existing resources and human capital. He works to address today’s global complexities and risks through the application of practicable neuroscience- and psychology-informed models and tools that elucidate the subtle habitual patterns at the root of inefficiencies. In his work, Gabriel promotes and teaches meta-learning—the capacity of “learning to learn”, adapt, grow, change, and collaborate— to maximize human capability during organizational change.
Gabriel helps organizations synergize the relationship between human capital and technology implementation during digital transformation. He has worked with SingularityNET, the world’s premiere decentralized Artificial [General] Intelligence (AGI) organization, first by managing the initial $36 million fundraise as part of the launch team, and more recently he served as Head of People, leading a doubling of people count during a rapid growth phase and facilitating organizational development, collaboration, and well-being among its staff. Gabriel has conducted research in various subfields of neuroscience and published seminal work on the crucial role of neuroscience and consciousness in the design and ethics of (AGI) and virtual and augmented reality technologies.
Gabriel is bilingual (English & Spanish), an author, and an international speaker for diverse audiences on the intersection of consciousness, technology, and human culture, working and presenting at Harvard, Stanford, among various universities. Gabriel is a long-time mind-body/consciousness practitioner and instructor, eclectic experimental musician, and world traveler.
For more about Gabriel’s work, visit:
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HACKIE REITMAN, MD (HR):
Hi, I’m Dr. Hackie Reitman. Welcome to another episode of Exploring Different Brains. And today, we’re very lucky to have with us Gabriel Axel Montes, who’s the founder of Neural Axis. He’s right at the intersection where technology meets the brain. Gabriel, welcome.
GABRIEL AXEL MONTES, PhD (GAM):
Hi Hackie, pleasure to be here again.
HR:
Why don’t you give yourself a proper introduction and tell our audience what you do?
GAM:
I’m trying to still figure it out, you know, it’s one of those. Honestly, it’s one of those things that in retrospect, you can tell a story and, and on the other hand, and as it’s unfolding, it’s like, wow, how? How did I? How did I end up here? You know, it’s all just interesting narratives and monkey chatter. So I’ll take my current stab at it, I could change anytime, right? Is that? Yeah, basically, I have a background in neuroscience. Did my master’s my PhD toured around the world, different institutions, for those degrees, Netherlands, US, Australia, and continued to, you know, go around the world for an academic circus presenting at conferences. So as far as Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Stanford University, so on and so forth, Harvard, and it just, it’s a fun, it’s a fun, you know, garland of different beads strung together, I’d guess. So I did my PhD. And before that started in between my masters and my PhD, I took some time off. I just felt a calling to explore the mind from the inside, I always felt that I’m trying to understand the brain from perspective of a laboratory or the objective view of the brain. And the Western sort of fusion, the way we attach the brain, the mind as being kind of linked always and synonymous. I thought that that was a potential limiter in getting a more comprehensive, wider ranging understanding. So I decided to explore the mind from the inside. And that started from just some spontaneous experiences I had in my mid to late teens, actually, that that’s why I decided to study the brain studying anthropology in the first place. And then through the, you know, academia, I realized, well, I need to really dedicate some time to study this from the inside. So I took various like forms of mind hacking practices. So everything from different Hindu yoga has Tibetan yoga, Taoist practices, shamanic things, good old meditations from different traditions, Qi Gong, etc. And I basically tried to piece together all this, and I’ve been really fortunate to have some great teachers, cross paths with me. And I always loved integrative approaches, so approaches that are able to view things from multiple perspectives at once that askew and sort of let go of certain of the embellishments that a lot of practices often come with when you read them out of textbooks and so on. And the way they’re mostly taught and just look at really the core technique underlying something, what is the transformation of consciousness under underpinning a particular practice? And that’s what I wanted to get to the core. And then, you know, basically, that that sort of cause a fusion of neuroscience with an interest in consciousness, and non-ordinary consciousness. So what happens in these exotic states of consciousness. And then, after that started unfolding, I got into technology. So artificial intelligence, Blockchain virtual reality I did. I worked in Hong Kong for a little while. And we were in a lab where we had to lead the master students in a programming design, masters of design to basically deliver their capstone projects in virtual reality and create virtual reality experiences and interested in this was right when the pandemic hit. I was in Hong Kong in 2020, when the pandemic hit and the protests were going on. Some interesting stories from from that from that time, for sure. And so that was a VR bit I’ve worked in with companies that are engaged in blockchain. So I have a big interest in how to fuse all these technologies of consciousness, neuroscience, well being and one of the other last things before I pause is, how to leverage all these things to solve collective issues and problems. complex issues such as climate change, poverty, I’m fragmentation of perspectives that occur around the world. How do we get together the human race to solve big problems? I’m curious about those questions.
HR:
So your recent trip to China had some interesting timing.
GAM:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It was, it was incredible. Hong Kong is a really incredible place, you feel like, you’re at this amazing intersection between East and West. There’s, of course, a big history there. Different perspectives and all that. When I was there, the pandemic and Wuhan are just broken out. And, and, you know, we went to Florida for a little bit thinking and be a little bit better. But Florida ended up being a little bit, you know, more tumultuous in the near term. And then Hong Kong, eventually got better again. So it was it was weird how different countries different societies handle that. And with the protests. My wife and I were actually walking home trying to get home. At one point, we were just out for the evening shopping evening, we were in a building, and there was tear gas outside. And I tried going outside to see if it was possible to wade through this and get home and I just, you know, you can’t really breathe in this stuff. It’s, it’s not I mean, you can make it through. But if you have any respiratory issues, you know, don’t count on it. So, and that was with my wife anyway. So we waited hours. And finally a local couple offered to escort us home. And we you know, what normally would take the 10 minute journey, 15 minute journey to get home took us 40 minutes as we circuitous ly found our way through the city. And there was one point and the rubble, by the way, you know, burnt cars, Subway, metro stations on fire, and on on the right side of us, or police officers, pointing lasers. And they’re cooked, equipped with shields, pointing lasers to the other side of us. And on the other side of us, were the dissidents and protesters. And we were going through this, like parting of the Red Seas moment. And we were like, are we gonna, you know, you we felt right on the edge of like, you know, this could be a final moment on the planet for us. And fortunately, you know, we went through, I would say that the clash between police and protesters in Hong Kong is, is much calmer than it is in the United States from what we’ve seen here in the past few years. So fortunately, we made it home. And that was quite a memorable experience.
HR:
Now, you work, especially during these COVID times where it seems like everything is on steroids, where you want people to work together and collaborate, and utilize technology. Tell us about your work related to productivity and collaboration.
GAM:
So, technology, just as a sort of preface to this context of technology, the way it’s turned out today, is very much in a way that is couched within this system that prizes, innovation, and profit, sort of at all costs. So what this leads to, for better and worse, in many ways, is siloing of approaches. And people try to find a way to kind of corner the market in their favor different companies. And so you’ll get the result of this is a lot of people, a lot of companies forming and doing this at the same time, across the world, predominantly though the west where this mentality is really champion. And you get this very incoherent landscape of technical technology and people adopting different products. It’s kind of like this sort of bizarre marketplace, kind of thrown upon consumers and technology in that mode and act in a cohesive way that allows for synchronization of various human actors of humanity together to solve big problems that are affecting us now because we’ve been a global village or a globalized society for a little bit a little while now already, you know, with the internet and this advancement and so on, and the globalization of the economy etc, and global finance. So we’re all interconnected our actions really do have Butterfly Effect, just look at you know, supply chain issues, when when I ship a vessel gets stuck in a particular canal somewhere.
So Technology is quite fragmented. And it’s not going to keep serving us that way for much longer. There’s something that needs to happen. That is more deeply connected to the summoning the ability to collaborate and people consciously, meaning being very mindful, and to not fall into traps of tribalism and egoism. So tribalism is even just a subtle tendency to the fun everyone to sort of pick us versus them. Or I will only work with the people that agree with me on some basic values. A lot of these things happen very unconsciously, in the human brain, the limbic system, the reptilian, you know, brains, so to speak. These things need to be looked at, examined and really healed, honestly, and let the mind be in service of the heart. So I’ve learned a lot about this. In the past couple of years, I’ve been involved with an organization called World System Solutions, that is basically facilitating others, and organizations in particular, around solving global issues, particularly climate change, because it’s sort of the, the one that most people can kind of feel and connect to. In the zeitgeist currently, though, ultimately, it’s really about addressing all global challenges. And that’s climate change is is all all the things that are fundamentally rooted in psychological malaise, of tribalism and egoism that prevent conscious collaboration to do something for the greater good together. So psychologically doing that in organizations being productive while doing that, finding out how to work in a capitalist system to achieve those things is, is a challenge. And it’s, it’s an it’s an amazing challenge, because it involves a lot of reflection of who we are as a species who we are individually, and then, you know, being compassionate with one another. As we grow, grow together and facilitate each other.
HR:
How do you see the way we’re going to use technology over the next five years? Like take us into the future from your unique perspective on technology?
GAM:
So the biggest thing right now is web 3.0. So we have been working in web 1.0, web 2.0. So we went from, you know, web 1.0 is like Windows 95 era, right? Like these terminal PCs with, you know, documents on a screen, and you type and move your mouse around the web to is sort of the interfaces we have today, which is the the basically scroll, drag and click on the mobile phone, being able to pay things with Apple Pay with WhatsApp with WeChat, in China, and so on. And web 3.0 Is the spatialization of all that, as emerging technologies come together. So we’re talking about augmented and virtual reality, just imagining your world when Apple and various other companies released augmented reality enabled glasses, we already see some prototypes of this with, you know, Amazon’s prototype glasses. When we saw Google Glass some years ago, augmented reality, robotics, artificial intelligence proliferating beyond where it is now. Blockchain Internet of Things, so smart devices, refrigerators, cars, and so on. So called Smart right. And blockchain which is a big deal right now, as well as these these ledgers, this immutable ledger that can track transactions in a pseudonymous way. You can use that to cut out a lot of middle men in any transaction, basically, and just have a sort of a single source of truth, for anything that’s happening, looking at the past, making contracts for the future, enforceable, and so so to speak.
So what happens when all these things come together, you get something you call the spatial web. So Dan Mapes, and Gabriel Rene wrote a great book on this called the spatial web, which describes what happens when all these things come together. You get this sort of world where everything is spatialized you have contracts, governance. You know, you can do this as a retail, you can do this in supply chain, and just your general environment, you know, accessing your autonomous vehicles, vehicles communicating on the street with buildings with pedestrians, access, authentication, and so on. So this is the this is the future. In the past, we’ve had these protocols Most like HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol that allow us to view documents on our, on our computer, well, in the future, you’ll have something else. And there’s actually an IEEE protocol, I believe the standards body technical standards body, there’s a new protocol called hyperspace transaction protocol. And that’s for the management of this spatialized. Web, essentially, it’s going to keep unfolding the you know, there’s already companies experimenting with this. Once augmented reality really kicks in, we’re going to see this kind of, you know, go hockey stick. So that’s happening. There’s also something else which is related, though a bit of a different nature is just web three, not really web 3.0. And the way I described web one to 3.0, but web three is kind of the, what we saw with cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Aetherium, Cardano, all these, all these blockchains and that became currency, cryptocurrencies.
There’s a whole world where people are experimenting with different new forms of human organization and governance using the blockchain. And these cryptocurrencies. All this stuff will be, you know, integratable with the spatial web, as I just described, that said, there’s a mini movement ticking on its own, because people can feel more like they can more democratically stuff organized, it’s sort of a way of, it’s kind of like a it’s almost like a hyper version of capitalism, in a sense, because it’s all digitized, and all very fast and very automated. And you know, it, there’s financialization of everything. And at the same time, people are looking for new creating new structures to self organize. And that leads to questioning of traditional, hierarchical corporate structure. So you get kind of this democratization. So still kind of a socialistic sort of way of organizing. So these are all great developments. What I will add, to add to tie this back to what we mentioned about collaboration, is that all this is still occurring in a fragmented way, there is no real global governance. And I don’t mean global authority in some sort of authoritarian stance, I mean, there is no way to coherently make decisions together.
HR:
No, it’s what we’re finding, and neurodiversity, everybody’s in their different silos. And it’s not coming together because everyone’s in their own little silo. And I think that’s what you might be describing, am I wrong? Or is that what you’re saying?
GAM:
Interestingly, I mean, every brain is different, you know, you can, you can intersexual intersection alized, every brain type down to the level of the individual. And it’s in a way, it’s always, technically been that way, we just didn’t really honor it and allow it to sort of come out of society in the way that it is now, which is great. So in a sense, even our individual brains are siloed. By their nature, you know, by the way that everyone is neuro diverse, which is a beautiful thing and create this tapestry that we all can leverage and take advantage of for our collective benefit. And at the same time, you could have a tower of Babel issue, right, where it’s hard to communicate, and how do we communicate, I mean, this exists with language period, right. And it exists with brains, just fundamentally and just now with our world complexified with the creation of mimetic micro cultures, on social media, and that on top of, you know, differences in upbringing, genetics, social environments, cultures that already this is proliferating. So it’s becoming more complex, I guess that’s there. It’s the communication and coordination and synchronization of among different agents and actors in a system is, is a challenge.
So we’re still missing that. And thankfully, there’s work being done towards this world system solutions is doing some work creating something called a social managing, which allows the government the governance of various stakeholders across the globe to be able to make the most optimal decisions for the benefit of the collective in terms of global challenges, like climate change. And then you have, you know, the spatial Web Foundation, which is a sort of nonprofit body looking to say, Okay, how when everything is measured and on the blockchain and technologized, how are we going to make this stuff work together without getting people stuck in it or falling through the cracks? I firmly feel the firmly may not be the right word. I would say that I’ve I’ve just observed and I’ve more conviction has been gathering around that we need a new way of cognizing our new way of sensing, perceiving, interacting, relating, being in rapport with one another, that is going to require healing and and operating from the heart, not just from the mind, and letting ourselves kind of resolve our traumas on a day to day basis with openness and compassion towards others, and not setting too many goalposts and moving targets for people to satisfy our, our individual and tribal wishes for acceptance.
HR:
Tell us a bit about Neural Print.
GAM:
So Neural Print is basically authentication as a service for web three or web 3.0. Based upon the mind and the brain. So the value proposition here is, can you unlock access to the physical and digital world, you could call it the phygital, if you will, unlock access to things using your mind and your brain. So this would entail for example, Hackie, do you have an electric autonomous vehicle? Well, if you do, is that vehicle yours? So that will be an authentication of your identity? Right? It will be like, is this Hackie trying to access his vehicle? Okay, yes, it is how he can enter the vehicle. Now is Hackie inebriated? If he is he’s not in the right state of mind to be driving his vehicle and therefore Hackie will have to enable self driving autonomous driving mode or have a friend drive him. Because otherwise, he’ll be, you know, in the in the out of the range of what legal right at the very least. And then safety, of course, so there’s identity, and there’s state of mind, are you in the right state of mind to access something. So neuro print, is creating the technology. To be able to enable this, we already have a minimum viable product that the neuropsychological assessment that is about six minutes in length based upon 100 years of neuroscience. So this is just something that’s used in a, it’s already being used by clinics, neuro psychological clinics. And it’s an online test that someone can take. And it gives you a sense of your cognitive style, hundreds of data points on an individual. That’s the beginning. And then we’re doing work on integrating this with biometrics. So to help grasp your, your present state of mind to be able to authenticate things.
The reason for this is that current authentication mechanisms are very static, so your passwords so you can lose them. They’re just this clunky thing, you have to remember, we have a password problem, let’s acknowledge that any passwords, I mean, I forget my password at least once or once every 10 days or something. So because I have to just too many things to log into, right. And of course, there’s these things like KeePass that allow you to store all your passwords in one place. But the spatial web, and web three with blockchain and everything are going to there’s going to be many things that in order to access it, we want to know a bit more about your qualifications to access it, you know, can you imagine one day pre qualifying for a golf tournament based upon the command, okay, close your eyes and imagine your perfect golf swing. So you know, that might not get you the full qualifications, the PGA, but you can maybe pre qualify in some kind of round or something.
So this sort of thing is what’s possible, then this is because the nature of the brain is dynamic. It’s not static. We’re not only neuro diverse in space, meaning like, there’s an individual, and that individual is different from the next individuals, there’s diversity there from person to person. There’s also diversity across time. I’m not who I was, when we last spoke three years ago, I mean, some cells may still be the same, to build their metabolism has certainly changed. So, you know, in the stories, we tell ourselves as we evolve as changing, so our state of mind their skills, everything, the dynamic nature of the brain, and mind is something that is missing. And in views of, of, you know, how to how to measure things happening in the mind and brain, even neuroscience tries to take the static images. So we want both, we want both, we want the thing that tries to be a little static to get an overall view of the person. And we want the dynamic. So that’s the essence of neural print, neural print. There you go. It’s a fingerprint for your brain neural prints. So that’s in development now. It’s myself and my co founder, Taylor Kuhn. He’s a good friend of mine, also a PhD in neuroscience. Neuro psychologists clinical so you know, we’ve we’ve got a good founding team.
HR:
Well that’s a segue into well being In 2.0.
GAM:
Well being 2.0. So current. And this all ties, we can see how this all ties later into the global challenges and call it needs for collaboration later. So wellbeing 2.0. So currently well being is basically mindfulness meditation and some openness to altered states of consciousness through psychedelics, right that’s starting to come in right now. What I call wellbeing 2.0, or next wave well being is targeting specific states of mind desired states of mind, and specific functions of consciousness and attention, and transforming those, and enhancing and expanding those, rather than kind of a generic lots of relax and sit and breathe, which is very helpful. That’s a great foundation. Indeed, it is, helps many people, and what is known about consciousness, historic historically and pre historically, in terms of what is possible, is barely, barely barely, just like one star, in a galaxy of stars, represented by what is well being and wellness today. If you look through all the wisdom, traditions, even just a few, you find an Archon of practices that are of course, you know, embellished in the cultural accoutrements of of, of the era in which they were produced, for sure. That being said, there’s an underlying thread of technique in each of these things. And that can be applied in modern context. So the idea is what I call precision consciousness. So the term like, you know, you talked about precision medicine, precision, consciousness is doing for consciousness, what precision genomics, precision medicine, different medicine, right, it’s getting particular it’s personalizing, its targeting it’s tailoring, and then turning these things into micro forms that are very directed and then bringing them together. So that a person’s individual neurodiverse, like now acknowledging path will be honored in this way.
And so that’s where the concept of what I call Pathform came from. So Pathform is basically I’m a founder of Pathform. It’s basically specifically focused on this precision consciousness delivering micro practices that are stripped down versions of what is in the Great Western traditions and syncretic, or combined versions of these practices. So platform is going to basically also inform some of the states of mind training that we’ll have to go into neural print, because neural print is going to have your you can’t rely on authenticating yourself based only on how you feel on a given day, you also need to kind of be a little bit versed in the state of mind you’re trying to get into. So platform is mostly focused on with well being to point LPs. So what we’re doing is we’re building a platform and content for people to be accessed these accessing these techniques have a profile, they can see where they naturally tend to go. And then we’ll embed AI into the artificial intelligence, machine learning techniques that will basically allow people to discover their own path through different practices and bring together the practices that works for them.
HR:
Is there anything we have not covered that you’d like to cover today? I think we’re going to have to have subsequent interviews because you are a universal person. You’re all over the universe, and I salute you. Thank you anything, any anything else today you’d like to talk about? Or I’m sure we’ll be having more interviews with you?
GAM:
Yeah you know, something I’d like to mention is I’m I’m a father now.
HR:
Oh, congratulations.
GAM:
Thank you. I have a two I have a two almost a two year old about, you know, 20 months now. And he’s incredible. It’s such a different element of life. He’s my first son, our first son, our first child, and it’s a wonder to watch him unfold. His soul, his emotions, his cognition. You know, I you could study all the neuroscience in the world, all the medicine all that but then watching a human being and become their own self and discover things is, is beautiful, you know, I mean it’s such an enhancement to life. It changes the dynamic of, of life. And it’s just an extra gift. And yeah. And I love that I love. I love bringing that up because it brings up so much mystery, you get a sense from talking from talking to me about all my projects that I’ve got this handle on all these different things. I mean, in reality life is, is nonlinear linear, you know, but raising a child is really nonlinear. And I love that because I could just get right to it. I can pretend otherwise, every day is different. It’s a mystery.
HR:
What is your child’s name?
GAM:
Sebastian.
HR:
Sebastian’s keeping you on your toes.
GAM:
Keeping me on our toes, keeping both of us on our toes. Yes. And, you know, I’m also very nomadic. So I love traveling, you know, I lived in Alaska, last year, we lived in Alaska. That’s a gorgeous place, I gotta say, being around glaciers, or the water is frozen inside water that’s 10,000 years old, basically. Well, older, really, because the water is always flowing around before it’s ice. But it’s been there for 10,000 years, give or take, right? As I understand. And just being around that and a different ecosystem. Depending on where you are in the planet, it evokes different things in you and you grow differently. And, you know, then you, you pass your birthday on a different place on the planet. And it just, it feels incredible to reflect on life in that way. So I’m really grateful that I’ve been able to live in Australia, Alaska, Hong Kong, and it’s not just travel lost or wanderlust. For me, it’s really, it’s just kind of one of those things that’s like a, I was born with that engine already kind of running up now. So I just kind of riding the wave a little bit. It’s just part of the flow, a little bit of nomadic lifestyle. So I picked up a lot along the way from these places. And yeah, I hope people get to do their healthy, you know, form of traveling as things open up again.
HR:
Where can our audience learn more about you and your work?
GAM:
So the best place to learn more about me in general is, you know, so Twitter is a pretty decent place. You know, my handle is GabrielAxel. And then there’s a link there to my website, and everything my website is, is a fine central source of things. That’s it’s neuralaxis.org, or gabrielaxel.com. So neuralaxis.org or gabrielaxel.com. And then there’s a way for there for people to reach me. So a lot of this, you know, wellbeing 2.0 stuff. You know, there’s some stuff on my website about it. You know, I teach courses on some of this stuff for people. I don’t advertise it very much. It’s not my, you know, the only thing I do that said, it’s, it’s some really good stuff. It’s helped me a lot of other people in incredible ways to open up dimensions of their being. So yeah, I do a bit of that.
HR:
Well, Gabrielle Axel Montes, thank you very, very much. It’s been a pleasure. You’re a universal man. I’ve learned a lot today. I’m sure our audience have and we’ll be sure to have you back soon. Thanks again for being with us again. Thanks so much.
GAM:
Thank you, Hackie. It’s always a pleasure, looking forward to the ongoing conversation.
