Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec were in a Washington, D.C. Airbnb, but they weren’t on vacation. They were feeding stock market data into a dish of living brain cells.
It was 2021, and the two neurosurgeons were testing Ksendzovsky’s far-fetched college idea: that brain cells could predict the S&P 500. They encoded daily prices into electrical patterns and fed those patterns into a dish filled with living neurons. Then they watched. The neurons didn’t just respond—they recognized patterns in the data. What started as a wild experiment revealed something bigger: that living neurons could be used as a form of compute.
