There is something about electricity at sunset. Or is it something inside me that’s happening when I look at it?

Maybe it’s the way light softens into these gradients. Continuous, analog, fading into silence. Or maybe it’s the way the world feels briefly suspended between states, like a system at equilibrium just before transition.

Ten years ago, I stood above the port of Chania (my old home from 18-23), at the beautiful Rosa Nera, watching the sun dissolve into the sea. Back then, I was studying computer and electrical engineering—thinking in voltages, currents, resistances and…bits. My “world” was transformed into something that could be described in circuits and logic gates, binary code. Structured, governed by laws that felt complex, but strict and elegant.

Trying to learn a new syntax, compiling and debugging code, performing experiments, parameters shaping different behavior, writing reports. Signals in, signals out. Kirchhoff’s and Ohm’s laws, more transfer functions, more waveforms, more equations.. More exploration, less exploitation. Not just in systems, but in life…A time when I was, for the first time, free and far from home, learning how to navigate both engineering and myself.

Did it make sense back then? Not at all actually. But maybe that was the point, a kind of grace period. It might sound nostalgic, but it’s not nostalgia.

It’s more the clarity or a perspective that comes with distance over time.

After almost 10 years looking at this picture, something “spiked”. What I didn’t yet realize back then was that I was already studying the language of the brain.

Because at its core, neuroscience is not so different. Beneath our thoughts, memories, fears, and desires-beneath everything that feels intangible but makes us who we are, there is electricity.

Tiny currents flowing across membranes.
Ions drifting through channels.
Voltage differences building, collapsing, propagating, waves of activity unfolding in time..

Our tiny neurons are speaking in spikes.

And somehow, between those fluctuations, there is something that resembles a code. Not purely binary as I once knew, but not entirely foreign either. Patterns. Timing. Sequences. Representations. The notion of absence and presence, silent and active states, opposing forces (+..-). “Something” that always “wins” and leads eventually to an action.

A different kind of computation

From where did this thought come from? We often imagine thoughts as abstract, short-lived entities that magically emerge in our heads. Memories feel like stories, emotions like waves that come and go, identity like something continuous and relatively stable (maybe not so, In that picture I was 19 -am I having an identity crisis?). But underneath, there is nothing “mystical”, only dynamics… Right now, I’m mapping concepts with my brain, just because I felt an urge to write. (Where did this urge come from?)

A memory is a pattern of connectivity. A sensation is at the end a transformation of signals.
A decision at the very end… is a threshold crossing.

Everything reduces beautifully to activity in circuits and systems. And our brain is a living circuit. And the unparalleled beauty in it, is that it perceives, rewires itself, adapts, learns and also forgets.

Its components are noisy, unreliable, heterogeneous and yet together, they give rise to something truly astonishing. Our own experience in this world. —-

I’m looking again at the picture. Oh.. On a second thought-my brain decided to update its internal model and reframe my view. There was some stress there, too. I remember now.

Deadlines that felt like hard constraints.
Multiple lab projects that stretched into the night.
Code that wouldn’t compile and bugs I couldn’t debug. Circuits and results that “refused” to behave. That “am I good enough?” or “am I suited for this” crippling-kind of feeling.

Now looking through the lens of neuroscience, stress itself becomes part of the system. A modulation of neural activity. A shift in dynamics. Like a reconfiguration. Cortical patterns are altered and neuromodulators released. And even time perception warps.

Stress is not just something we experience. It is something our living brain creates. —

At the start of my phd journey, I was thinking that going from engineering to neuroscience was such a huge change. I know that I am drawn to the brain more than any other organ, but let’s be honest: what do I know about the nervous system after all? Nothing!

Looking back now, I see that transition more as a change of scale, rather than field. I don’t know if that is an overstatement or an oversimplification.

Expanding from silicon to biology.
Expanding from deterministic to probabilistic.
Expanding from studying designed systems and controlled environments to evolved ones, operating under uncertainty.

But the language remained -more or less- the same.

Signals. Dynamics. Energy. Information.

(if I could visualize this “aha” moment, my neurons would probably be partying…)

Now there is something deeply nostalgic in realizing that the equations I once solved on paper describe living tissue from different animals. That the same basic principles governing a simple RC circuit can approximate the membrane of a neuron. Concepts I learned in lecture halls and online videos, are the very mechanisms through which perception emerges. And slowly I started seeing the connections. Well actually, my brain began making connections about connections… [What is really driving this delirium?]

Somewhere between those sunsets in Crete and my lab/home of today, the abstraction became kind of personal.

Electricity stopped being just a tool for building systems.

It became the medium through which we exist. **The substrate of experience itself **. And now I realise how privileged I am to still be studying it, only now through a slightly different lens -> The brain.

And maybe that is the most humbling realization of all…

Everything living carries energy. And much of it flows as electricity. Everything we are… every memory of a face or place,
every feeling of warmth from a sunset or the dew of the sea,
every sense of self… is encoded in patterns of neural electrical activity.

Transient. Ever-changing. Dynamic in every sense of the word.

Sometimes I think back to moments like these in Chania. Standing there, watching the light fade, listening to the sound of waves and people strolling at the port. So unaware that I would soon be embarking on a completely new, challenging and adventurous journey.

From engineered systems to living ones. From understanding electricity… to understanding biological brain’s extraordinary intelligence, to decoding “ourselves”, our brain pathologies, and learning to close the loop by engineering systems that speak the same electrical language. And since they speak the same language, hooray!! we can interface back!

In the end, it was never about leaving one field for another… It was about realizing that

the same current flows through both.

Zurich, 29/03/2026.

Olympia