What the Brain Knows
On Neural Codes, the Soul, and Choosing Love Over Fear
What I am thinking…
As part of the Cultural Index series at The Studio by Tishman Speyer at Mission Rock in San Francisco, I convened a Brain Salon alongside my dear friend Zem Joaquin, CEO and Founder of Near Future. A hundred and four people showed up. Zem surprised David Krane and me with a re-birthday cake. The date was May 27th. I had not planned it that way. It just turned out to be exactly one year.
May 27th, 2025 was the day they removed a meningioma, an avocado sized brain tumor, from my brain at UCSF, getting 100% of it out. No cancer. A complete clean bill of health. ( YAY!) May 27th, 2026 was the Brain Salon. One year apart, unplanned, and more meaningful for it.
The salon was born in my hospital room. I had time on my hands and used it the only way I know how. I started reading. The research, the papers, the science. Surrounded by more concentrated wisdom than I had encountered in one place in a long time, jamming on every inch of it. The work happening at UCSF felt too important and too world changing to stay inside those walls. So I asked Dr. Eddie Chang, while he was still my surgeon and I was still his patient, whether he would ever consider doing a salon. He said we would talk about it later. I wrote it in my diary. He said, how about in a year. Here we are.
The year that led here
I had a six day headache that Advil and Tylenol could not touch. A doctor at One Medical said it was likely a virus but suggested I consider a scan if things did not improve. When the headache escalated and Vicodin brought on what felt like an allergic reaction, I headed to Marin General. While I was there I remembered what the doctor had said. I asked for a scan. Dr. Tarun Aurora, a UCSF neurosurgeon, was called in. I was told the tumor was inoperable.
In that moment, with Steven beside me, I made a choice I have thought about every day since. I chose love over fear. Not as a platitude. As an actual decision, made in real time, in a hospital bed, with a diagnosis I had not seen coming. I had been reading Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment, whose whole philosophy is about embracing exactly what is showing up rather than fighting it. And what was showing up was this. I could not change the facts. What I could change was how I met them. Fear was not just a wasted emotion. It was going to paralyze me from traveling this journey with the right mindset. So I told my doctor early on:
You handle the science. I will handle the soul.
He did not look like a man who heard that very often.
They put me in an ambulance to transfer me to UCSF. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. I could see the light through the window from the gurney. The orderlies were complaining about the ambulance, the shift, the equipment. And I was lying there thinking: are you kidding me? I had just been told I had an inoperable brain tumor and these guys were unhappy about the gurney. So I interrupted them.
I said, I hear you, but let me offer you a reframe. You could be on a donkey cart crossing this bridge right now. The donkeys are going to the bathroom, it smells terrible, you are bouncing around on a wooden plank, and there is nothing you can do about it. But you are not on that cart. You are in a perfectly good ambulance on a perfectly good gurney, crossing one of the most beautiful bridges in the world at sunset. As they pulled me out I said: I offer you that as a leadership lesson. I hope you use it.
The reframe is something I have practiced my whole life. There are always multiple ways to see something. And I was not going to spend whatever came next in fear. I also knew how lucky I was. I had plans to go to Europe in two weeks. If this had happened in France the outcome might have been completely different. Everything about the timing, the scan, the question I asked while I was already in the room, was an invitation to be grateful rather than afraid.
David Krane, my dear friend through decades of entrepreneurship, board work, and the tech and venture world, had navigated his own brain tumor at UCSF and helped orchestrate getting me there, where a full MRI revealed the tumor was operable after all. The operation was performed by Dr. Tarun Aurora, Dr. Eddie Chang, and Dr. Philip Theodosopoulos. Dr. Theodosopoulos was in the room last Wednesday. I looked at him at one point and felt the particular gratitude that has no adequate language.
The inquiry
Zem opened the morning by moderating a conversation about the personal journeys that brought David and me to that stage. Then I took over and interrogated Eddie on the science.
Dr. Eddie Chang is the Chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF, founder of multiple research laboratories, winner of the 2025 Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and founder of Echo Neurotechnologies. I believe, without hesitation, that he is a future Nobel laureate.
My inquiry was this: what is the neural code, and what does cracking it mean for our understanding of what we are?
The brain has a language. Not a metaphorical language. An actual electrical pattern, a grammar of firing neurons that encodes everything we say and feel and think and intend. As Eddie put it: “DNA is the code for all of life. The neural code is the information that processes intelligence, reasoning, the way we feel everything.” He maps it by operating on patients while they are awake, reading the living brain in real time. David was awake for his entire surgery, one millimeter from his motor cortex, giving thumbs up signals throughout. That was the margin.
Eddie’s team has decoded speech in people who can no longer speak and given those words back. A man named Poncho had not spoken in fifteen years. His first decoded sentence: “I want to see my family.”
A woman named Ann had not spoken since 2005. She raised two daughters without a voice. She now speaks through a digital avatar. The New York Times piece on Poncho anchors you in where this began, though the science has moved dramatically since. Echo Neurotechnologies exists to scale this work to the people who need it.
What stopped me was not the technology. It was what Eddie said about what the technology reveals. Language, the ability to think and reason, these are things machines can now do. He no longer believes intelligence is what defines us as a species. The answer, he said, will be both biological and spiritual.
Where the neural code ends
I have been writing in this series about the things that cannot be simulated. In the Soul essay I wrote that soul is the one thing they cannot simulate. In the Wisdom essay I wrote that our cache is our wisdom, accumulated through lived experience that no model can replicate.
Now I am wrestling with a new question this Brain Salon cracked open: if the neural code can be read, what is the soul code? What is the spiritual code? And where does it live?
I had invited Rabbi Sydney Mintz to be in the room because the spiritual dimension of this conversation is not a footnote. It is central. She asked Eddie the question also on my mind: with all the resources and capital pouring into artificial intelligence, where is the equivalent investment in consciousness, in humanity, in spirituality? Sydney and I have started calling it AI & SI. Artificial intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Two disciplines that deserve to develop together with equal seriousness and equal resources. Because one without the other is not progress. It is just speed.
There is a story Eddie told me that I will share once I have his permission. The shape of it: a patient came to him for surgery and said he was not nervous about the operation. What he wanted to know was whether it would change his relationship with God. Eddie said: I do not know.
Because if the neural code can be read, and it can, if thought and language and emotion can be decoded from electrical signals, and they can, then where does that man’s love of God live? Is consciousness something the brain produces, or something the brain serves?
I come back to that ambulance on the Golden Gate Bridge. The big reframe. To choosing love over fear not because it was rational but because something in me knew it was the only thing worth choosing. That knowing did not come from my neocortex. I am not sure it came from my brain at all.
The qualities that make us most human, love, wisdom, joy, community, consciousness, soul, and awe, are not soft skills. They are practices. And they get stronger under pressure, not weaker.
The machine cannot simulate them. Not because it is not smart enough. But because it has nothing to lose.
I firmly believe that the soul is our sixth sense. And I do not believe it lives in the brain. That may be the next convening.
What I said at the end
Our job, at this frontier, is to double down on what makes us divinely human. Our wisdom, our compassion, our empathy, our play. Because those are the things that will help us dance with these machines and usher these new frontiers of science toward something worthy of the humans they are meant to serve.
What I know is that the people building the future rarely have enough of the right conversations with each other. That is where I work. Connecting the science to the capital, the innovation to the culture, the breakthrough to the human being on the other side of it. As intelligence becomes fully inhabited by machines, it is incumbent upon all of us to push harder against our own edges. To be radically curious. To come together across disciplines, to fuel the science and the discovery and the human conversations that no machine can generate for us.
Here is a link to the video from the Brain Salon. The first few minutes were cut off. 🤦🏻
What I Am Doing…
Through One Park Advisory I work with global companies, founders, leadership teams, and boards on what comes next. This summer I am also codifying something I have been teaching for years at USC’s Iovine and Young Academy into a more shareable framework: Community Is Serious Biz. Community is not a marketing tactic or a loyalty program. It is a strategic asset, and the organizations that build real ones will outlast and outperform the ones that do not. I have been taking this into accelerator programs and early stage companies and the conversations have been extraordinary. More soon, but in the meantime you can watch my recent keynote at Draper’s Accelerator here.
I am also building a personalized AWE Roadmap builder with my rockstar RA Larissa Oliveira. If we are to fortify our humanity, each of us will need a plan. Work in progress. All suggestions and ideas welcome.
What I Am Seeing…
If you can get yourself to Portland before July 26th, GO. The largest North American survey of Hockney's work ever assembled, more than 200 prints, collages, video works, and iPad drawings spanning six decades, is on view at the Portland Art Museum. Fun fact: I worked on a project with David and musicologist James Sellars a long time ago called Haplomatics. It changed the way I see 100% of everything. Hockney has always painted the world as a place worth paying attention to. Swimming pools, British landscapes, friends, flowers, the iPad as a new kind of canvas. In a moment when we are all being told to look at screens, he reminds you to really, really look at life.
Marshall Ganz, People Power Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal
The man who orchestrated Obama's campaign has spent his career proving that ordinary people create extraordinary change. I attended a community organizing salon in Mill Valley and kept thinking: the mechanics of narrative, relationship, and collective action are the same whether you are building a movement or building a company.
I live in Mill Valley and recently discovered that one of the most celebrated poets in the world is my neighbor. Jane Hirshfield trained as a Zen Buddhist monk and writes about impermanence, attention, and the quiet truths most of us walk past. Start with her conversation with Krista Tippett on On Being. You will slow down in the best possible way. She is also the co-founder of Poets for Science, which tells you everything you need to know about her. ❤️
Some Retail Therapy…
Traveling this summer? You made it this far, so here’s your reward.
Do you get all locked up on planes or car trips? Achy muscles, tight knots? I travel with the Rapid Release. Miracle in a wand. Worried about catching something? Profi helps block and eliminate airborne germs. I do not board a plane or go into a crowd without it. Want to boost your immune system and stay healthy no matter what? I take Orthoimmune on the regular. Afraid of bug bites? My BFF Liz swears by these Insect and tick Shield socks. Trust her. My million miler friend Ken, who also happens to be a world renowned roboticist and therefore knows a thing or two about bodies and mechanics, swears by this McKenzie Self-Inflating Lumbar Support Pillow. Your back will thank you. Glasses and phone cameras covered in fingerprints? PEEPS Eyeglass Cleaner is a miracle cleaner. And because summer means sun, my friend and beauty entrepreneur Melissa’s company just dropped this amazeballs sunscreen: OSEA Marine Screen SPF 50. Clean, mineral, and it does not make you look like you lost a fight with a white crayon.
Travel well. Travel healthy. See you out there!
Through www.tinasharkey.com I keynote, moderate, and convene for organizations around the globe wrestling with what comes next. I work with boards, investors, executive teams, and founders on strategy, governance, storytelling, and transformation. I also teach and run programs at USC's Iovine and Young Academy, which I love.
Reach me at tina@tinasharkey.com
Sparks with Soul is my place to explore what’s emerging across culture, business, technology, and humanity and what it means to stay human inside all that change. I write it as a labor of curiosity and care. Sharing is caring, so if something here sparks for you, please re-stack, comment, and or share it with people in your world who could use a few sparks. You can learn more about my work, speaking, and projects at my website.
xo, Tina
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Great read. Lots of wonderful tips and tricks.
Love this and love you so much! While your writing here is amazing, the salon was even more so! Thank you for all you do, your brilliance and how generously you share 🙏❤️