I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Many years ago, I would talk about how stress can trigger mental illness. I think after the pandemic, it doesn't

really require much background explanation, right? When there's enough stress in the world,

suddenly we have a massive emergence of anxiety and social problems and other psychiatric illnesses

as well, because stress is a trigger. So our idea is if we can figure out how stress triggers either

susceptibility or resilience, we can sort of tune the brain more towards the direction of

resilience instead of going to the direction of susceptibility. So our idea is that if we

can find the electrical patterns, we'd say where we need to go, right, and how we need to stimulate

that location, we can then use these tools to drive resilience in the brain in a way that is

non-invasive in humans. That's Kaffirjurasa. He's a psychiatrist, engineer, and neuroscientist,

with a novel perspective on mental illness. It's based in large

part on his own experiences as a child, and it's influenced by being black in a research world

where, as he puts it, very few people look like him. Well, this is going to be really enjoyable

for me because you're such an interesting person.

You've accomplished so much, and I'm curious to know how it began when you were a boy.

How old were you when you got your first computer?

Yeah, I must have been 11 or 12 when I first got my first computer.

So there was also a computer in my dad's house. We used to

spend weekends there. But my first computer was the first one I was allowed to take apart.

You took it apart and put it back together again at the age of 11. Yeah, well, no, no. The first

one I put back together, but not all the way. My mom returned to the store the next day because it wouldn't turn on.

My second one was I got two days after my first one, I took apart and put back together.

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