A Nearly Twenty‑Year Exploration

From a Questionto an Experiment

Many people ask, “How do I know I’m thinking?” or “What does the brain really perceive?”

Twenty years ago, as a high school student, I turned the question around:

If I reduced outside sensory input as much as possible, what would I still perceive?

To explore this, I designed a simple, repeatable experiment. I kept the environment as quiet and steady as possible, reduced outside distractions, and observed again and again under similar conditions.

Over time, I began to notice something active and changing.

My eyes were closed, yet I could see scenes that kept changing.

When I tried to force or control them, they changed right away, as if to remind me that they followed their own course.

To me, this felt different from deliberately imagining a picture or recalling a memory.

I didn’t decide in advance what I wanted to see, and I didn’t aim for any fixed image. What kept me exploring were scenes I had never experienced before, and the detail and order they showed as they changed. What appeared was different every time, with no fixed formula to predict it.

What began as a curious experiment became an exploration I’ve stayed with for nearly twenty years.

From Just Meto Others

As these experiences became familiar, another question became important:

Was this something only I could experience, or could other people take part too?

At first, I was the only one who could observe this consistently. Most people who heard about it thought it was impossible. With no instruments involved, it seemed too personal, too subjective, and completely at odds with what people believed at the time. I wanted to know whether I was simply an exception, or whether others could experience it too under the right conditions.

I started by inviting people close to me to try it, in two ways. Some learned my method and tried it on their own. Another did it together with me.

Those who learned the method on their own saw nothing at all. The person who did it with me saw it.

That gave me a lot of motivation. I kept refining the process and testing it again and again, learning from every attempt. One by one, people reported that they were beginning to have similar inner experiences.

What people experienced was not the same. They described different scenes, forms, movements, and physical sensations. I never asked them to see any particular image.

But across these different descriptions, one feeling kept coming up: the sense of entering a tiny world that felt real, immersive, and full of life, like a small but complete universe.

That is why we use the word Microverse, and why we named the service Microverse Exploration.

From Subjective Experienceto the Lab

By then, the people around me and I could experience these scenes together. I called it a “subjective experience.”

But with a background in science and engineering, I knew subjective experience alone wasn’t enough. I wanted to know:

Could this be measured?

In college, I started a lab project to record this experience with instruments. Working up close, we measured my brain readings and those of another participant, looking for changes during the process. During the same period, I was also working on something else: how to gradually increase the distance between us.

During those years, I was trying to gather quantitative data while also trying to overcome the limits of distance.

Quantifying the data depended on support from many people. I spent a long time consulting professors from different fields, and classmates and senior students helped too. I was lucky that the university had the resources to make these experiments possible. The instruments alone were extremely expensive.

A group of friends from other departments also volunteered their time, unpaid, to run experiments with me. They came from philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, psychology, electrical engineering, computer science, biomedical engineering, statistics, and more.

What we wanted to know was whether the brain showed any change that corresponded to this experience during observation. After repeated measurements, we never found results that could answer that question.

What made it harder was that, in our tests at the time, wearing measuring equipment made scenes that had been stable become unstable. And whatever the scenes themselves were, we couldn’t record them with any of the scanning or imaging methods we tried.

In other words, whether we tried to measure the state of the brain itself or capture the scenes, we couldn’t do it.

That experience also shaped how the service works today.

We don’t ask participants to wear any measuring equipment, and we ask them to remove wearable devices, so the process stays as simple and stable as possible.

During that time, I often envied the heart. The heart has clear measures like heart rate and blood pressure to track its state. But “usable brainpower” still has no widely accepted measure.

From One Roomto Another

At first, the people I worked with and I were in the same space. While we were measuring in the lab, I kept thinking about another question:

If the other person wasn’t next to me, could the process still work?

That question led us to try different distances and settings. We tested repeatedly and kept adjusting how the space was prepared, how we communicated, and how we guided the start of each session. At first, most people thought this was impossible: once two people were apart, the conditions it needed seemed out of reach.

After many tests, I found that distance was not an absolute limit. As long as the conditions were steady enough, people could still have these experiences.

We started up close in the same room. Through ongoing testing and refinement, we gradually increased the distance, then moved to separate rooms.

From one room to another, every step came from long-term commitment and constant adjustment.

From Measuringto Seeing

Our distance tests were becoming more and more stable. But the part I wanted most, instruments, data, and measurement, never moved forward.

No matter how we designed the experiments, how many times we repeated the measurements, or how many variables and systems we adjusted, the results were the same. We went from undergraduates to graduate students. Some of us had already started working. Our “scientific research” was still where it began.

That was when different voices started to emerge among us.

Some insisted that experiments don’t produce results overnight, and that if we kept going, the results would come.

But we all knew the data really wasn’t moving. The instruments had improved, and our observation had matured, yet the data looked almost exactly the same as when we first started the lab.

Looking at that data, what else could I do?

When it came to the data, our frustration ran deep. It was a long stretch.

But strangely, as soon as we removed the instruments, the observation itself kept progressing, and we kept learning more.

So more and more voices emerged.

Some insisted on not giving up on the instrument route. Others offered a different view: in the history of science, many things existed first, and scientific understanding caught up later.

Cells and microorganisms existed long before the microscope was invented. It wasn’t until the 17th century that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the Netherlands, using a microscope he made himself, first saw tiny living things swimming in a drop of water. Before then, no one could prove they existed. But they had been there all along.

So this group believed our experiments weren’t wrong. Today’s instruments and methods simply couldn’t do it yet.

That was the debate we found ourselves in.

But even with the experiments at a standstill, we weren’t the kind of people who give up easily. In the end, we all agreed:

Not now doesn’t mean never.

Maybe, far in the future, when the right instruments exist, this data and these scenes will have names of their own.

What we could do now was make the remote process more and more stable, so more people could see this for themselves. Among them, someone might help name it. Someone might one day invent the instrument that can observe it.

That was when a seed was planted in all of us: one day, we would take this to the rest of the world.

It isn’t that we don’t want instrument measurement and scientific validation. It’s that we can’t do it yet. If we only waited, this might never be seen. So we chose to let more people experience it firsthand, so it could be seen first.

From Another Cityto a Video Call

But to take it to the rest of the world, we had no connections.

After graduate school, the instrument research was put on hold. Leaving school meant leaving its resources behind. The instruments were a huge expense. Until new technology became available, continuing to invest would just mean burning money.

I started working as a coach. It was how I made a living, but the seed inside me never went out.

We didn’t stop the remote work.

The people who had shared that agreement became our team. Alongside our own jobs, we kept making the remote process more stable.

We paid for the travel the tests required with money we earned ourselves. Looking back, we really were crazy.

We went from the same city to different cities. Later, we even used team members’ business trips abroad to test over longer distances.

That took a long time too. The farther the distance, the more precise the environmental conditions needed to be. Several more years passed. We started with neighboring countries and gradually reached Western ones.

When our first test abroad worked, we didn’t stop to celebrate. Since the day we started testing at a distance, we had been doing the same thing: finding, bit by bit, the variables that affect stability. Each time something worked, we went looking for the next one.

Eventually, the video format became stable too. That step gave Microverse Exploration the chance to reach more people.

But we were ordinary people.

The first people we thought of were our professors from university. They knew about the experiment and had watched us all along.

It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help.

A recommendation letter carries a professor’s name and years of professional reputation. In academia, recommending research depends on data. And data was exactly what we lacked.

Even if they believed in us, they couldn’t vouch for us.

They wanted to help, but there was nothing they could do. We understood.

So we wrote letters ourselves, one after another, to researchers and scientists abroad.

Most of them never got a reply.

We knew why: research without data rarely gets a response.

We had no connections, no one to vouch for us, and no one to open the door.

So we decided to open it ourselves. We founded Brain Backend Platform in the United States, because that is where the frontier of science and technology is.

From Explorationto Charging

During those years of exploration, one conversation also shaped what I later wanted to offer through the service. One of the people I worked with talked with me not about what he saw during the process, but about his life afterward. Facing the same situations, new possibilities began to come to mind for him, and to come his way.

Later, others began sharing their own descriptions too. That made me notice that what this experience offered might reach beyond the time spent with eyes closed.

But these descriptions were still vague. I wanted to understand it more concretely.

By then, I was already working as a coach in Taiwan, with founders, engineers, investors, and executives. I often noticed that the same person, facing the same problem, could see different possibilities on different days. Some days, one question was enough to help them see it from a new angle. Other days, they understood every word but still found it hard to move forward.

Their knowledge and experience were always there. The difference was how much of it they could use in that moment.

It made me ask: beyond more knowledge and more methods, do people also need more brainpower to use what they know?

So I started trying something different.

I began with the clients I had worked with the longest.

I knew those moments well: a project was stuck. They understood the problem clearly and knew everything they needed to know, but the flash of insight just wouldn’t come. Their thinking would go so far, then hit a wall and stop.

Before, all I could do was say a little more, or ask the question a different way.

This time, because we had worked together long enough, they were willing to let me try.

If they agreed, I asked them to close their eyes and simply sit. No questions to answer, no need to keep thinking about the project. Beyond words, I gave them a charge.

In the days that followed, they came back one by one and told me that where they had been stuck, something had broken through.

One, then two, then more. I also began inviting a few highly capable people, the kind who rarely get stuck, to try it. Their answers were consistent: it helped a lot.

Over time, I shifted the focus of my coaching to the charge.

I went from a coach who could only rely on words to a coach who sometimes didn’t need to speak at all.

It also made me more certain about the word “charge.” What they described really felt like the brain being fully charged and switching on.

That gradually made clear what I wanted to offer: an exploration unlike anything people had experienced before, and more brainpower they could bring back into everyday life to think, choose, and act with.

The early attempts also shaped the form of the service: those who learned the method on their own saw nothing, and the person who did it with me did. So this isn’t a method you practice on your own. It’s a process we provide and you experience directly.

You don’t need to generate the power yourself. We provide the charge, and you take more usable brainpower back into your own life, to use wherever you want.

The people I worked with already spent a great deal of time learning, thinking, and working. I wanted this service to fit into their lives, with nothing new to learn from scratch and no long-term practice to add.

The 30 minutes also came from testing, bit by bit. At first, it could only last a few minutes. Over time, we extended it until we reached about 30 minutes. Beyond that, it couldn’t stay stable.

Together, these experiences shaped what Microverse Exploration is today, including its 30-minute Core Charge.

From Interfaceto Backend

Our company needed a name that reflected our focus.

To explain the name, it helps to start with how we usually understand a person.

We look at what they say, the decisions they make, and the results they deliver. We look at grades, job performance, and all kinds of numbers.

Today, we also have many more tools. Smartwatches track heart rate, blood oxygen, and stress levels. Smart rings track how deeply we sleep and give us a recovery score each morning. Phones track our steps, screen time, and focus time.

For many people, the first thing they do after waking up is check these numbers and use them to judge how they’re doing that day.

These tools are useful. But they have one thing in common: they tell us about a person through what has already become visible.

Take a computer.

Everything you see on the screen, from the desktop to the windows, is the result of what the backend has already done.

The screen may look still, but behind it, the backend never stops running. It keeps processing data, running programs, and allocating resources, without pausing for a moment.

What appears on the screen next is determined by the backend.

This is how we think about the brain.

Beneath the words we say, the decisions we make, and the signals instruments pick up, there is a layer that keeps running. Like a computer’s backend, it never stops.

This layer shapes what you’ll think of next, how far your thinking can go, and whether you have a flash of insight.

It supports all of this, but how it works and how it makes these decisions can’t be seen, and is hard to record.

We have long believed that the scenes people see with their eyes closed are connected to this layer too.

During our years in the lab, we collected data, but we could never match it to this experience. None of the measurement or imaging methods we used could tell us how the scenes arise or what they actually are. Even while helping with the process, I couldn’t see what participants were seeing.

That is a lot like a computer’s backend: you know it’s always running, but you can’t see the process itself.

By contrast, over nearly twenty years, we have approached the experience from another direction. Rather than using external instruments, we reduce external sensory input as much as possible, with me guiding the process. Participants close their eyes and notice what they can still perceive.

The two approaches don’t conflict. Instruments record what can be seen from the outside. We try, through our own perception, to get closer to the layer that keeps running inside.

We call this layer the Brain Backend.

In our understanding, the Brain Backend is the route through which we explore the Microverse. It is also what we aim to charge, because everything that shows up on the interface is shaped by it.

That is where our company’s name comes from.

The name says what we focus on, not what we’ve proven. As for what the scenes really are, we’re still exploring.

From My Curiosityto Your Experience

Telescopes let us see distant stars. Microscopes let us see details too small for the naked eye. These tools expanded what humans could see, and they kept me curious about another question: through our own perception, what else can we experience?

I believe that when someone truly sees something for themselves, that clarity is something no secondhand account or theory can match. Seeing isn’t just getting an answer. It’s the power of confirming something for yourself.

At first, this was just a question I wanted to answer. Today, it’s an experience you can have yourself.

In every session, I personally welcome each participant and guide the preparation before we begin. We provide the Core Charge. You experience it for yourself, then notice your everyday life afterward and judge the difference.

That is why I founded Microverse Exploration: so that years of exploration can become something more people can take part in, experience, and judge the value of for themselves.