There was a time when I wanted to be a physicist just like my parents, so I applied to the Faculty of General and Applied Physics of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. It happened so that I joined a research group that studied living systems and subsequently developed an interest in the mechanisms of brain activity. I am very grateful to Victor Gurfinkel, my teacher, who invited me to his laboratory. I was very interested in recording signals directly from the brain (by implanting an electrode into the monkey’s brain), so I moved to the States in 1991 after the Iron Curtain had collapsed. Since then I have been studying the neurophysiology of the primates. Over the past 5 years I have been focusing on invasive brain-computer interfaces and made a certain contribution to some breakthroughs in this area. I hope that my most important discoveries are yet to come, and perhaps they will be done in Russia.