6/8/22
Elon Musk's high-profile foray into connecting brains to computers, a 2-year-old company called Neuralink, detailed its ambitions and unveiled some initial results at a livestreamed event yesterday before an invitation-only crowd at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. With thousands watching online, Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, described the firm's goal of using tiny electrodes implanted in the brain to "cure important diseases" and "achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence."
Details about those planned applications remain sparse, but Neuralink briefly presented some of its first rodent data from ultrasmall electrodes at the event. And in a seemingly spontaneous answer to a question, Musk revealed that the company has already used its device to allow a monkey to control a computer with its brain. The company aims to implant electrodes into a person paralyzed by spinal cord injury by the end of 2020, he added—and Neuralink's head neurosurgeon, Matthew MacDougall of California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, made a presentation wearing scrubs. But the firm will need clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to perform such an experiment in the United States.
The first generation of Neuralink's technology consists of a chip containing neuron-size polymer threads that a surgical robot would stitch into the brain to record electrical signals from neurons and convey them to a wireless device worn behind the ear. In a white paper also released yesterday, the company describes using this system to record from thousands of its electrode "threads" in a living rat.
Several other groups have recently unveiled ultrasmall electrical probes designed to minimize damage to brain tissue and gather clear, long-term recordings from neurons. Neuralink putting thousands of these electrodes into a working brain interface is an exciting feat, says Cynthia Chestek, a neural engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "This is by far the largest channel-count system using neural-scale probes," she says.
A looming question for Neuralink and the larger field, she says, is how long the materials in the probes and processing chip resist degradation and make reliable recordings. "You need to make the whole system last for decades," she says. "That's what I imagine their next major focus will be."
But it’s worth highlighting that Musk wants Neuralink to do far more than treat specific health conditions. He sees the technology as an opportunity to build a widely available brain-computer interface for consumers, which he thinks could help humans keep pace with increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.
So while modest, Neuralink’s research already foreshadows how this technology could one day change life as we know it. At the same time, it’s a reminder that the potential, eventual merging of humans with computers is destined to introduce a wide range of ethical and social questions that we should probably start thinking about now.
Neuralink wants to link your brain with computers, but that will take a while
Founded in 2016, Neuralink is a neuroscience technology company focused on building systems with super-thin threads that carry electrodes. When implanted into a brain, these threads would form a high-capacity channel for a computer to communicate with the brain, a system supposed to be much more powerful than the existing brain-machine interfaces being researched.
One major barrier to inserting these incredibly tiny wires, which are thinner than a strand of human hair, is actually getting them past the skull and into the brain. That’s why Neuralink is also developing an incredibly small robot that connects the electrode to humans through surgery that’s about as intensive as a Lasik eye procedure. On Friday, Musk outlined how the company hopes to do the procedure without general anesthesia in a single-day hospital stay. That’s the goal at least, and would represent a huge leap forward from previous brain-machine interfaces, which have required more invasive surgeries.
“We’ve been connecting forms of computers to brains for 20 or 30 years already,” Nolan Williams, the director of Stanford’s Brain Stimulation Lab, told Recode, referencing deep stimulation used for patients with Parkinson’s as one example of connecting a brain and a computer.
“The brain itself uses certain frequencies and certain kinds of electrical thresholding to communicate with itself,” Williams explained. “Your brain is a series of circuits that kind of intercommunicate and communicate between themselves.”
Essentially, a brain-machine interface can use the electricity the brain already uses to function along with a series of electrodes to connect the brain with a machine. Neuralink cites previous examples in which humans have used electrodes to control cursors and robotic limbs with their minds as the basis for its system. But what’s novel about Neuralink’s plan is making the process of connecting a device with the brain minimal, while also massively increasing the number of electrodes engaged. The company wants to make brain-machine interfaces not only easier to install but also more powerful.
As the focus of Friday’s event, Musk showed what the second generation of that robot will look like: a large white structure with five degrees of freedom.
“The robot is a super complicated, highly-precise machine which is able to both capture your brain and then with almost a sewing machine-like, micro-precise needle and thread, place the neural threads in the exact right location based on the surgeon decisions around what the safe locations are for the threads to be inserted,” Afshin Mehin, a designer and founder of the firm Woke, which worked on the robot’s outer device that holds the needle, told Recode.
The machine operates at a very small scale, and Neuralink hopes to expand its capabilities. For instance, the current robot has a 150 micrometer gripper, and an even tinier needle — less than 40 micrometers — which can “grasp the implant’s threads then precisely insert each into the cortex while avoiding visible vasculature,” according to Neuralink robotics director Ian O’Hara. He added in an emailed statement that, while the robot currently handles only the insertion of the threads, Neuralink is working to expand the robot’s role in surgery to increase the number of patients it can help and make the procedure shorter.
Musk said that, in the past year, Neuralink simplified its plans for a wearable device that connects to the threads implanted in the user’s brain. While the first generation of this device would have been installed behind a person’s ear, the newest version is a small, coin-size device that would sit under the top of their skull.
“It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” explained Musk, who compared the device to a smart watch.
The research is still in early stages and, as it advances, will likely require focusing on how the technology can help people with specific, severe health conditions first, according to Stanford neurosurgery professor Maheen Adamson. While the medical applications of such technology could be wide-ranging, moving it from its current, nascent state will require the close oversight of the Food and Drug Administration, which would not comment specifically on Neuralink.
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