Philip Low

Philip Low (born 1979)

Family Low's father, Steven Low (born Seweryn Lwów) was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland, who came to Canada in 1948. In Canada, the elder Low attended McGill University on a chess scholarship and worked for Canadian mining tycoon Joseph Hirshhorn, later "investing in copper mining in South America ... [and] brokering oil deals in the Middle East" according to an obituary following his death on May 19, 2024. According to his daughter, Veronica, she and Low established the Steven Low Foundation in 2022 to support the identification and reburial of the remains of First Nations children from Indian residential schools. According to Low, he became interested in the fragility of the human brain as a child when his father overdosed on a sleep drug and threatened a Swiss banker with a weapon.

Tertiary education Low received his B.Sc. in pure mathematics from the University of Chicago; during his studies there, he undertook a summer research internship at Harvard Medical School.

In 2007, Low went on to earn a Ph.D. in computational neurobiology from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), for work done at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. At Salk, Low developed Dynamic Spectral Scoring (DSS), and the SPEARS (Sleep Parametric EEG Automated Recognition System) algorithm, which is used to map brain waves. Low presented the algorithm as his doctoral dissertation, the body of which he says was one page long and the shortest in the history of the university. and contains a single-page 'Chapter 1' as the only non-preface, non-appendix, material.

Career In 2007, Low founded NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company that manufactures a brain monitoring device called iBrain, inspired by his doctoral research. While single-electrode headsets were historically seen as offering poor data quality due to fewer sensors, Neurovigil's Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has proven that single-electrode recordings can provide rich data. and Novartis. It can record baseline sleep EEG data before subjects take medication, allowing researchers to monitor longitudinally how the medication affects brain activity. Low stated that, during the Great Recession, he made a strategic decision to avoid the consumer market, and instead form alliances with pharmaceutical companies, to generate cashflow and intellectual property. The trials were featured in Episode 6 (Can our minds be hacked?) of Season 4 of the popular science TV series, Through the Wormhole. The device was formally launched in the United States in 2024 and was featured in Time Magazine's "Best inventions of 2025".

Awards and honors

Low was named to the 2010 edition of MIT Technology Review's "35 Under 35" list of young innovators.

Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness In 2012, Low, with Christof Koch and David Edelman, published the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which asserts that "humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness" and that non-human life may also possess consciousness. He also collaborated with Stephen Hawking, who provided him with data for his non-invasive iBrain monitor to interpret brain waves to decipher human intentions and enable communication. In January 2025, following the Elon Musk salute controversy, Low started criticizing Musk publicly, calling him a "total miserable self-loathing poser." He stated that Elon Musk's "pattern is to take companies, invest in them, destabilise them, and then take them over" and that "...the White House is his biggest investment to date." Low stated that his view of Musk's pattern was based on his experience of Musk's investment in his company, and on his observations of how Musk acted with Twitter.

Works

Articles

Doctoral dissertation

Selected patents

US patent 2014031711A1, Philip Low, "Correlating brain signal to intentional and unintentional changes in brain state", issued June 14, 2016