It was curiosity. I didn't set out to cure Parkinson's at all.
Dr. Fon mentioned that curiosity-driven research is the start of any innovation and discovery. So my research field deals with how the brain processes auditory information that matters to you. We hear a lot of sounds in the environment, and we ignore them by focusing on speech. There's a particular brain network devoted to that part of auditory processing.
If you think about a pianist, one outstanding performer, they play music not by reading individual notes but by processing large chunks of music and transforming them almost immediately, automatically, into movement. That is the part of the brain mechanism I'm interested in.
So I studied the basic mechanism—molecular, cellular, neurophysiology—but it wasn't enough. My personal opinion is that we have done a tremendous amount of research, but if people are caught up in these mountains of knowledge they have to step aside to see how much they can apply. I took that initiative.
Because this intervention is non-invasive, I can do it. That's how it has evolved. We couldn't do it until a couple of years ago because of technology. Now there's the technology. With fourth-generation iPods we can link the music very precisely with the step size, almost in real time.