rajkotupdates.news : elon musk in 2022 neuralink start to implantation of brain chips in humans: Elon Musk’s Neuralink has reached a significant milestone as its brain-computer interface (BCI) technology enters the human testing phase. The groundbreaking development aims to establish a direct link between the human brain and computers, potentially revolutionizing the way we interact with technology.
The BCI implant, designed to be embedded in the brain, holds the potential to enhance human capabilities and treat neurological disorders. With this crucial step, Neuralink aims to gather vital data and further refine the technology for future applications. Elon Musk’s ambitious vision of merging humans with artificial intelligence inches closer to reality as human testing commences.
At a Friday event, Elon Musk revealed more details about his mysterious neuroscience company Neuralink and its plans to connect computers to human brains. While the development of this futuristic-sounding tech is still in its early stages, the presentation was expected to demonstrate the second version of a small, robotic device that inserts tiny electrode threads through the skull and into the brain. Musk said ahead of the event he would “show neurons firing in real-time. The matrix in the matrix.”
And he did just that. At the event, Musk showed off several pigs that had prototypes of the neural links implanted in their head, and machinery that was tracking those pigs’ brain activity in real time. The billionaire also announced the Food and Drug Administration had awarded the company a breakthrough device authorization, which can help expedite research on a medical device.
Like building underground car tunnels and sending private rockets to Mars, this Musk-backed endeavor is incredibly ambitious, but Neuralink builds on years of research into brain-machine interfaces. A brain-machine interface is technology that allows for a device, like a computer, to interact and communicate with a brain. Neuralink, in particular, aims to build an incredibly powerful brain-machine interface, a device with the power to handle lots of data, that can be inserted in a relatively simple surgery. Its short-term goal is to build a device that can help people with specific health conditions.
The actual status of Neuralink’s research has been somewhat murky, and Friday’s big announcement happened as ex-employees complain of internal chaos at the company. Musk has already said the project allowed a monkey to control a computer device with its mind, and as the New York Times reported in 2019, Neuralink had demonstrated a system with 1,500 electrodes connected to a lab rat. Since then, Musk has hinted at the company’s progress (at times on Twitter), though those involved have generally been close-lipped about the status of the research.
Musk opened Friday’s event by emphasizing the wide variety of spinal and neurological conditions — including seizures, paralysis, brain damage, and depression — that Neuralink technology could help treat. “These can all be solved with an implantable neural link,” said Musk. “The neurons are like wiring, and you kind of need an electronic thing to solve an electronic problem.”
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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