Elon Musk wants to start chipping human brains within six months – IGN

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A specially designed robot – which has been imaginatively named R1 – then gets to work inserting the ultra-thin wires carrying the electrodes individually into precisely targeted sections of the brain. In a live demonstration that took place during the show and tell, it took the R1 robot just 20 minutes to install the 64 wires of the implant into a model brain.

The current “N1” device has now been miniaturized to the extent that it matches the thickness of the cranial layer removed to implant the chip. This allows the technology to occupy the hole where the bone once was and be concealed under the skin.

According to Musk, putting a Neurolink interface in your head would be like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch. Not the best sales pitch I’ve ever heard.

Live stream link for today’s event: https://t.co/Q9VFL9Fxav

Meet at 6pm PT

—Neuralink (@neuralink) November 30, 2022

Although a daunting prospect, the possible future benefits of adopting such a device could be considerable. Musk’s intention is to create a whole-brain interface that could be used medically to dramatically improve the lives of people with disabilities, and which in the long run could allow anyone to interact with technology using just the implant. and the power of his mind.

The company has already tested its implant on a number of pigs and macaques. In 2021 Neuralink revealed that it successfully trained a monkey implanted with the device to play the arcade game Pong using only signals from its brain.

The monkey – named Pager – first learned to play and understand the game using an ordinary joystick. During this process, the implant recorded Pager’s brain signals and identified which ones were used to control the joystick, and therefore move the paddle.

The joystick was then removed and the Macaque was able to successfully direct the paddle with its thoughts by communicating via implanted Neuralink technology.

Since teaching a monkey to play Pong, Neuralink has been busy testing and improving the technology in anticipation of a transition to human trials. According to Musk, the company has now submitted most of the relevant documents needed for such experiments to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for ensuring the safety and effectiveness of human testing.

In this week’s show and tell presentation, the controversial entrepreneur reiterated his overall view of Neuralink implants and presented the progress being made in their testing and development.

Musk also revealed his timeline for human testing, saying “in about six months we should be able to have our first Neuralink in a human.” He went on to explain that Neuralink’s animal testing is intended to be “confirmatory, not exploratory,” and that rigorous bench testing is performed before implanting an animal subject.

Animal rights groups had previously condemned the company’s treatment of its lab animals. As CNN reported, an American non-profit group – The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine – called for an investigation into the company’s practices, citing “gross violations of animal welfare law related to the treatment of monkeys used in invasive brain experiments”.

“We’re confident that someone who basically has no other interface to the outside world would be able to control their phone better than someone who has working hands.”

The company is now working with a troop of six monkeys and has already improved the chip embedded in the skull of the Pager macaque. Since the Pong experiments, the monkeys have been encouraged to complete a series of tasks designed to test the interface, with the new hardware dramatically increasing the speed at which they could interact with the technology using a mouse-controlled cursor. the mind.

One such test was shown at the event, in which a monkey instructed a cursor to move to a highlighted key on a virtual keyboard in order to write the words “welcome to show and tell”.

The screen was designed to showcase the potential benefits that technology could bring by allowing people with disabilities to quickly communicate using a mouse cursor or phone, without the need to interact with a physical device. .

“We’re confident that someone who basically has no other interface to the outside world would be able to control their phone better than someone who has working hands,” Musk explained.

The company is also working to future-proof the Neuralink implant by allowing surgeons to easily upgrade hardware when a new model becomes available. However, there are currently significant challenges that must be overcome – many of which are the result of our body’s impressive healing abilities – if that is to be the case.

“Our goal will be to turn on the lights for someone who has spent decades living in the dark.”

Musk has already set two ambitious short- and medium-term goals when the FDA approves testing of Neuralink implants in humans. The first is to restore a form of vision to patients who suffer from blindness.

“Even if someone never had vision, like they were born blind, we think we can still restore vision,” Musk said. “The visual part of the cortex is still there.”

This is theoretically possible due to the implant’s ability to stimulate the brain, says visual neuroscientist Dan Adams, principal investigator at Neurolink.

If attached to the visual cortex, stimulation of the wires could be used to bypass the human eye and form an image directly in the brain. This technique could also be scalable, with more electrodes – and therefore stimuli – allowing higher-resolution images to be projected into the brain.

Scientists envision a future where data from a camera could be transmitted to the implant, which in turn stimulates the right cells in the visual cortex to create a simplified version of the image in a person’s brain.

“Our goal will be to turn on the lights for someone who has spent decades living in the dark,” Adams explained.

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