Malcolm Gay is an arts reporter for The Boston Globe, where he covers visual and performing arts. He previously worked as a contributing writer at The New York Times and the critic-at-large for Riverfront Times, where he reviewed visual and performing arts. His writing has also appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, and TIME, among other publications.
In 2004, the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter, named Gay that year’s “Outstanding Emerging Journalist,” and in 2005 he received the James Beard Award for Nutrition or Food-Related Consumer Issues. His work has since received other national accolades, including top honors in 2008 from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and in 2009 from the National Association of Black Journalists. In 2010 Gay was awarded the Woodward-Bernstein Award from the Missouri Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He was named an Alicia Patterson Fellow in 2013.
Gay studied Philosophy and Art at The Colorado College, later earning an MJ from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, where he studied narrative non-fiction. The Brain Electric, which details the race among top neuroscientists to merge the mind with machines, is his first book.
About The Brain Electric: The Dramatic High-Tech Race to Merge Minds and Machines
Leading neuroscience researchers are racing to unlock the secrets of the mind. On the cusp of decoding brain signals that govern motor skills, they are developing miraculous technologies that will enable paraplegics and wounded soldiers to move prosthetic limbs and will give all of us the power to manipulate computers and other objects through thought alone. These fiercely competitive scientists are vying for government and venture capital funding, prestige, and wealth.
Part life-altering cure, part science fiction, part Defense Department dream, these cutting edge brain-computer interfaces promise to improve lives-but they also hold the potential to augment soldiers’ combat capabilities. In “The Brain Electric,” Malcolm Gay follows the dramatic emergence of these technologies, taking us behind the scenes in operating rooms, startups, and research labs, where the future is unfolding. With access to many of the field’s top scientists, Gay illuminates this extraordinary race-where science, medicine, profit, and war converge-for the first time. But this isn’t just a story about technology. At the heart of the scientists’ research is a group of brave patient-volunteers, whose lives are given new meaning through these experiments.” The Brain Electric” asks us to rethink our relationship to technology, our bodies, even consciousness itself, challenging our assumptions about what it means to be human.
