On Friday, Elon Musk gave an update on what his third most prominent company: Neurelink is. Neurlink had a much lower profile (especially compared to Tesla and SpaceX) before this time last year, when Musk first went into detail about the company’s goals and progress. And the goals were surprising: a mass-market brain implant that could be installed by a robot through same-day surgery.
With this year’s update, little has changed about the overall plan, but plenty of short details have been tweeted over the intervening 12 months. And progress has been made, in which Kasturi introduced his audience with a group of pigs, who indicated he was already taking, the version of his implant was 0.9, in which the human test will be arranged to follow soon.
Design on the brain
One of the big differences between this year and last is the overall design of the implant and its supporting hardware. The basic goal is to keep the surgery part simple by reducing the size of the hole needed to make the skull. This means that a small diameter implant that is in contact with neurons should not be placed near it and requires a connection to separate hardware placed behind the ear. All of this is added to the level of complexity and the need to run some wires over the surface of the brain.
Most of them have been removed. For now, instead of trying to target anything deep in the brain, implants will only target things in the front of the brain, close to the surface of the cerebral cortex. The neurosurgeon employed by Neuralink was at hand (in scrubs, as he was last year, so you knew he was a surgeon) and said that there are a lot of motor and sensory processes that go through the mantle and thus can be targeted. Is. Implant. Kasturi followed by saying that we can only “solve” blindness and deafness by focusing on the mantle.
As with the old design, about 1000 electrodes would be inserted into the target collection of neurons, and they would be connected to the rope above the surface of the brain. But in this case, they will do it by the shortest possible route, eliminating the need to run the wire over the brain surface. The hardware of the rear ear is also gone. Instead, there will be an implant that is spread over the skull, essentially replacing part of it.
Musk showed one of the implants, and it represents the main reconsideration. He said it was around 23mm (although it had no radius or diameter) and was about 8mm thick – the thickness of the human skull was later chosen as the closest match. The device looks like a very thick coin or miniature hockey puck, and has all the hardware needed to keep the implant working. This includes a battery large enough for all-day operation and hardware required for wireless inductive charging. There are also support chips, mostly obtained from Wearable, which controls charging and enables wireless communication via Bluetooth.
Spikes
But the central feature is still Neurallink’s custom chip designed to identify and transmit patterns of neural activity. The individual neurons, on which the electrode will hear, communicate through a series of firing called “spikes” – a short burst of electrical activity emanating from background noise. Musk said Neurlink’s chip spike is programmed with a set of patterns that match the normal range of behavior seen in real neurons. The chip will take the analog electrical activity recorded by the electrodes, convert it into digital data, identify any spikes of activity, and then find a template spike that best matches that activity.
This allows it to transmit pattern-identifying code, created for wider compression compared to complex, noisy neural activity. It is absolutely essential for a device that will communicate through a low-bandwidth interface like Bluetooth.
The chip will also allow the use of electrodes to stimulate neurons, although the musk has not gone into the details of this. It takes a little more power than passively reading their activity, which can limit how much they can use this.
Put it in place
Using a microscope to identify and avoid blood vessels when threading electrodes into the brain, the team is still in the process of performing the hardest parts of the implant. The prototype robot shown by Neurlink last year, which could easily have been a mistake for the inquiring Droid, is no more. Instead there is a clean, white, very medical looking design with all the tools and point bits needed to put a hole in someone’s skull when not in use. While the team is still working to adapt the robot to reach deeper areas in the brain, the initial focus on the cortex makes the robot’s task a little easier for the current task.
Kasturi promised that the surgery would only take an hour, would not require general anesthesia, and the recipient could go home with their implants the same day.
Kasturi then introduced the first recipients of the current planting design: a group of pigs. Naturally, there was a controlling animal, happily moving past the mera and eating from the hand of its handler. Then there was another pig that had been planted earlier but then the device was removed. This, Kasturi stressed, was important because people want to upgrade their implants, especially as the company plans to continue improving its hardware.
That Should The pig has been followed with a functional implant, but Gertrude was shy, which upset the animal technicians and Musk was joking about the dangers of live demos. Eventually, it came out, and the neuralink was able to show that it could hear on neurons that receive signals from sensory cells in the animal’s saliva. Yet another pig was brought out which does two implants; One device focused on the animal’s proprioception system, and the team was able to accurately detect the animal’s foot position.
Next stop: men?
Like last year, Musk said the goal of the presentation was to recruit good people to work at Neurlink, which currently has about 100 employees. But it has certainly left some hints that things are getting closer when it comes to marketing. Initially, he said Neurlink received a breakthrough device designation from the Food and Drug Agency, which handles medical-implant approvals. It enables the company to engage in an ongoing dialogue with the FDA, which Neurlink wants to ensure that, if finally approved, will help identify different types of data.
Kasturi also said he plans to do initial testing with tetraplexics. It follows in some previous working methods, including those who have successfully used brain implants to control robotic hands. Getting approval for human experiments with tetraplegics is relatively easy, as there is no other treatment available to them. Kasturi did not say when those experiments would begin.
So right now, we all have some bits of information that have been freely recorded from roaming pigs and not many technical details about how it was obtained. To an extent, it doesn’t represent much clear progress or much progress from last year’s release compared to what the research community already has.
But it doesn’t really capture the situation well. While this field has been able to plant a large number of animals ’brains over the years, I don’t remember anyone leaving an animal that was obviously obscure from its non-planted companions, as these were pigs. And Neuralink’s hardware is designed for scale production, in contrast to the typical production of academic research laboratories.
Progress
As critically, the company has shown plenty of creativity and flexibility. The problem of compressing the complex data that its hardware will collect has been solved, and the team made some major changes to its compositions compared to a year ago, all of which will simplify the implantation process and the surgery required to place it. In space. And that, over the course of a year, represents significant progress.
That’s not to say that Neurlink is set for a smooth glide of success. Its future still has a lot of hardships and years of safety and effectiveness testing. But the update provides some very real reasons for optimism.
