By JoJo Platt, senior contributing editor
October 13, 2026 | Imagine you are back in high school English class, and Mr. Newell has assigned everyone a report on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Ten pages are due tomorrow, and you haven’t cracked open the book. It’s pre-Google times, so you are limited to Cliff’s Notes and your older brother’s A+ essay that your parents keep handy in his portfolio of scholarly greatness. (You’re still waiting for yours.) Everyone in class—nay—everyone in every tenth-grade English class in the history of your school has done this assignment, yet for all the similarities of the task, every essay is different. Because every student is different. Why do we imagine that diseases of the brain would be any less stratified? You soldier on blindly through your essay of the still-unread novella. Because you know enough about the theme and characters from class lectures, you can make guesses that are “close enough.”
Philip Sabes, CEO of Arbor Neuroscience and cofounder of Neuralink, suggests in a recent company blog post that we are taking the same, woefully inadequate approach to treatment. “A diagnosis is a category, agreed on by convention. Symptoms are what a particular person actually experiences,” he noted. “Two people with the same diagnosis can look very different.”
A New Combination of Cartography and Metrology
Sabes and Arbor are out to develop a brain map with correlated response measurements; the first map is intended to track the effects of a neuromodulation intervention. Much like reading the book before writing an essay, this approach can document “the causal chain to find signals that move when we intervene.” The second map is an attempt to connect specific symptoms with specific circuits so as to provide target specificity according to the symptoms as they present across various diagnoses. The end result? Delivering a “treatment plan that is determined by a symptom-to-circuit mapping rather than a diagnostic label.”
Arbor Neuroscience is classified as a Focused Research Organization, a time-bound structure intended to answer significant scientific challenges outside the politics of academic institutions and without the hangover of public charity fundraising and reporting headaches.
The question is, if Arbor succeeds, will neuromodulation finally have the precision and efficacy it needs to become a first-line therapy? Only Kurtz knows and he’s somewhere up river.
Functional Brain Imaging
Arbor Neuroscience is part of Convergent Research and was formerly Forest Neurotech, founded by Sumner Norman, Tyson Aflalo, and Will Biederman. Forest built a wearable device for functional ultrasound imaging of the brain, the Forest 17. It measures localized changes in blood flow driven by neural activity, the same class of signal as fMRI, but at better spatial and temporal resolution, and it reaches deep brain structures. The next version will also deliver focused ultrasound neuromodulation: a deep, bidirectional window onto the human brain.
“Most of the excitement around brain interfacing was, and still is, focused on BCI devices that connect people to something else: motor or sensory prostheses for now, and in the longer term to each other, to AI, or to some virtual future,” said Sabes. “But I became drawn the other way, to devices that connect the brain to itself: to understand what a circuit is doing, and how to change it. The scientific questions are just as deep, and people need the answers now. Here, the bottleneck is understanding.”
These are research instruments, and they work in people who have had a section of skull replaced by an implant that ultrasound can see through, usually after surgery for trauma, stroke, or a tumor. Most implants are made of ultrasound-opaque materials, but Arbor estimates that tens of thousands of people in the U.S. have an implant that permits functional ultrasound imaging. Many of them live with problems of memory, attention, mood, and sleep—among the symptoms that are hardest to treat in psychiatric and neurological disease.
