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Quick note: if you are already up to date with the project and want to know the news announced on YouTube on Friday (28), skip the beginning of the text and go directly to the last section.
More than Success in business, Elon Musk built fame by getting in the habit of betting his chips on whatever project he deemed a good idea. This has already seen the billionaire venture into the tech market in a variety of ways, from electric cars to Solar panels, passing by ultra-fast bullet trains and, more recently, space exploration projects. In 2017, however, Musk made public a plan as pretentious as the colonization of Mars: to merge computers with the human brain.
The Neuralink project was first launched in March of that year. The story was that Musk, fascinated by the possibility of integrating man and machine, buy from company in January 2017. There was no product, just an idea to develop. For the South African billionaire, it was enough.
The following month, the businessman made his first attempt to explain to the world what trip that was. To this end, he supported a science popularizer to share the idea in the most accessible way possible, which includes stick figures and other freehand drawings.
You can see the result of this association next post from the blog Wait but why signed by American writer Tim Urban, which, by the way, is a timeless indication of good scientific source. It is a gigantic text, which took weeks to write, but whose idea we will try to summarize in a few lines.
Intertwining complex neuroscience concepts and interviews with the entrepreneur and members of the Neuralink team, the text announced a prototype chip. It would be implanted in the brain and would be able to capture the electrochemical signals that neurons emit and translate them in a way that could be interpreted by a computer.
At the time, the founders’ proposal was to help people with severe brain injuries or who had lost their movements due to a stroke, for example. But the text reveals even greater aspirations. In addition to this application in the health area, the project could serve to create the dilution of the borders that exist today between humans and computers.
From the beginning, the intention was for the Neuralink chip to literally become part of the user. With this little piece attached to the command center, humans could not only play games with their cell phones using their minds, but also access the cloud, computers, and even other brains. All wirelessly.
“This flow of information between your brain and the outside world would be so automatic, it would be like the thoughts you have inside your head,” explains the blog text.
Mass adoption of such technologies, Musk said at the time, was a matter of survival. Having a chip implanted in the brain is a natural step in the integration between man and artificial intelligence. Resisting machines, in the words of the businessman, was like asking to become obsolete. “We will have the option to stay behind and become effectively useless or as pets, like a house cat or something like that, or eventually discover a way to be symbiotic and merge with artificial intelligence.”
Musk said plans were for the device to be available on the market within four years. To be used by people without medical supervision, and bought in electronics stores as if it were a bluetooth headset, the entrepreneur designed something like eight or ten years.
First results
It was only in 2019 that Neuralink showed the public some progress. A launch conference served to reveal the first results, among them, the appearance of said chip. Called “N1”, the earliest version of the device was a 16mm square silicon electrode.
Dozens of flexible, ultra-thin cables (4 to 6 micrometers in size) came out of it, or 20% of the thickness of a hair. The idea is that these small threads were connected directly to the user’s cerebral cortex, creating the human-machine symbiosis.
Brain implants are not something new, it is true. However, the apparent advantage of the chip created by Neuralink is that it is less invasive than other previously tested techniques. To implant it, Neuralink developed an ultra-precise surgical robot, controlled by a doctor, and capable of inserting these tiny wires into brain tissue without causing damage.
After applying local anesthesia, a small, completely painless hole is made in the skin and skull. The wires are then placed in contact with the brain tissue. A terminal for connecting the cables is behind the ear.
In 19 surgeries performed on rats, the robot-surgeon was 87% effective in the task of implanting and connecting the leads. The entire procedure is estimated to take no less than 45 minutes. Best of all, you don’t even have to shave your hair for this. You can watch a teaser video below that illustrates the progress of the project, released a year ago.
The results were also reported in a scientific study, signed by “Elon Musk & Neuralink”. A version of the survey has been published. on the biorXiv platform, which receives articles not yet reviewed and, in October of the same year, was accepted into the Journal of Medical Research on the Internet. The study explains that the chip was tested on mice and it worked very well, thank you.
That’s because the device was able to detect “spikes” between the rodent’s neurons in real time. These “spikes” occur when one neuron sends information to another, which is then translated into an instruction for the rest of the body. It is a very subtle movement to be picked up by an MRI machine, but it may be picked up by a chip inside your head.
Rodents weren’t the only ones that served as guinea pigs. No event For the reveal, the billionaire blurted out that a monkey had managed to control a computer using his brain. Nothing tested so far. The idea was that, in 2020, the first tests with human volunteers would begin.
What brought back today’s event
After a delay of 40 minutes, this conference on Friday (28) began by addressing the points of the project that have been improved during the past year. The main thing concerns the design. Previously, the implant structure required two incisions in the head and a device visible behind the ear. Now, users can go unnoticed. The chip can be inserted through a single opening at the top of the head, and the scar is covered by hair in a good way.
“You wouldn’t look normal with something behind your ear,” Musk said, justifying the change. “If I had a Neuralink now, you wouldn’t even notice it. Maybe yes, ”he joked (really?). You can see an image comparing the two versions below.
The new device, called “Link V.09”, is the size of a coin (23mm x 8mm) and has 1024 electrodes. The rest of the structure, made up of small threads and a thickness equivalent to one twentieth of hair, resembles the first version. What changed was the size: last year, the cables had to go from head to ear. In the current version, they are 43mm in size.
“It’s like a Fitbit in your skull, with very fine threads,” defined Musk. The idea is that, in addition to controlling health, the implant serves daily functions, such as listening to music, for example. Its battery has an autonomy of one day and must be charged, by induction, during the night. Connected to the cell phone via bluetooth, it can operate wirelessly at a distance of between 5 and 10 meters.
The machine used to perform the surgery, and the improvements it has made to improve its precision throughout the year, were subjects with little prominence. Again, Musk decided to explain that the procedure would take less than an hour and that the owner of the chip could leave the hospital the same day.
The idea is that In the future, deciding to implant a chip in the brain is as simple as buying a new electronic one, says the businessman. Avoiding talking about values, he considered that the device, and the surgery, should come out for “a few thousand dollars ”in a few years.
However, the most anticipated part of the event was the experiment that aimed to demonstrate Neuralink in action, capturing spikes of activity in vivo in pig neurons. To do this, Musk began the demonstration with a pig that had a chip installed in the region of the brain responsible for smell two months ago.
Every time a neuron in the region sent out a pulse, a spot appeared on the graph. Therefore, it was possible to hear “beeps” when the pig’s brain was stimulated after interacting with some environment in the scene, either by smelling the feed in the hand of the keeper or the floor of the pen placed on the stage.
In addition to the pig with the implant, Musk showed two other animals for comparison: one of them never had a chip in its brain, and the third had been without the implant for a few weeks. According to the businessman, the idea was to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to use the implant and then remove it without leaving any sequelae.
According to the Neuralink team, the implant can do more than simply “read” brain activity. Through the chip, it will also be possible to transmit information to the brain. It stimulates neurons instead of receiving information from them.
However, there are some limitations to this idea. For now, the electrodes do not extend beyond the cortex, which is the most superficial layer of the brain. It is in this layer that much of the processing of skills such as smell or vision takes place, but other possible applications, such as returning the movements of a paraplegic patient, would require wires that penetrate deeper into the brain. There is a technical limitation there. The brain is a very corrosive environment and one problem is that the wiring lasts a reasonable time inside.
For now, each Neuralink electrode is capable of stimulating something between one thousand and 10,000 neurons. It is little when we consider the complexity of brain functions, which generally involve several areas of the brain acting together. Thus, the amount of stimuli that could be “created” ends up being small.
In July this year, the FDA (Anvisa of the USA) authorized the project. However, the technology must comply with new security protocols before being tested in humans for the first time. The idea is to start testing by recruiting a small group of people paraplegic and tetraplegic. Musk argues that the technology could be used to treat different medical conditions, such as paralysis, autism or depression.
As it could not be otherwise, Musk took advantage of the meeting to suggest a list of other applications, say, less conventional – and that, with the technology available today, are still very far from reality. Between them, save memories and reproduce them again in the best style Black mirror or connect in a session of “consensual telepathy” with the brain of another user. You can see the full presentation in the video below.
At the end of the presentation, Musk stated that he was looking for researchers from various fields (biology, software engineering, neuroscience, etc.) to join the Neurolink team. Tim Urban, author of the Wait but Why blog, who first revealed Neuralink’s aspirations to the world, summed up the size of the challenge in a post on his Twitter account: “If you ever fantasized about being an engineer from the 1880s working in the lab at [Thomas] Edison, apply to work at Neuralink. “
