I'm an Android programmer who studied bioinformatics at the Free University of Berlin.

I wrote the proposal for https://biology.stackexchange.com/ and my current pet project is BetterEar.

Small children can hear the difference between all kind of different phonemes but once they grow older they lose the ability to hear phoneme differences in foreign languages that their native language doesn't make. As a result most German native speakers can't hear the difference between belief and believe, between advice and advise or between effect and affect.

My Android App trains the ability to hear the difference between different phonemes by giving the learner deliberate feedback. This allows the learner to regain the ability to distinguish phonemes that they lost as a child.

While some people think that the way to improve information flow is through building brain-computer interfaces that can magically push information into brains, I think it makes sense to do our best to optimize the information flow of our existing channels.

After school I went to study bioinformatics because I thought the way to improve the human brain is through looking at neurons. Today, I think improving the human brain is more about finding the right kind of stimulus. The human brain is an amazing learning machine on it's own and we don't need to put any electrodes into it, to train it to do better.