Elon Musk believes that 2022 will be the year Neuralink goes from implanting microchippers in monkey brains to human brains.
Elon Musk, best known for the car brand Tesla and the space company SpaceX, co-founded the company Neuralink in 2016. Since then, the company has been working on developing a microchip that can be operated into the brains of humans. The chip will enable the brain to communicate with computers.
The online newspaper wrote in 2019 that the company used rats as experimental animals. Since then, the company has advanced to monkeys, hoping humans will get the implant in 2022. In April, Neuralink announced this video which shows a monkey playing computer games, and how the implant in the monkey’s brain causes it to communicate with the game.
From monkeys to humans
– Neuralink works well in monkeys, and we do a lot of testing to be sure that it is safe and reliable, and that all Neuralink devices can also be removed in a safe way, Musk said in this interview with the Wall Street Journal, writes Business Insider.
He says that the first people to have these implants operated on will be people with spinal cord injuries, who tetraplegia and quadriplegia.
Musk says that the development of the implant will accelerate when they have operated on it in the first humans. The reason is that it will then be easier to get feedback from the “experimental animals”.
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Neuralink is not the only company working on technology to connect the brain to computers. In July 2021 Business Insider wrote that the company Synchron received permission from the US authorities to test the technology on humans.
Connect human with computer
The goal of the implant “The Link” is to connect the brain to a computer, so that you can control the computer with thinking power. On the website of Neuralink, the company thinks that the implant will be connected to an app you have on your phone. Through this app you can connect to other equipment with Bluetooth.
The first goal is for people with paralysis as a result of nerve damage to be able to control the mobile phone with thinking power.
Also read: Six things you may not have known about your brain
There is still a long way to go before the implant can be used safely and functionally. There are several challenges here, and Neuralink even talks about some challenges its website, and Illustrated Science made in April this year this article about Neuralink’s challenges.
Among other things, one must be sure that implanted electrodes do not lead to infection, carry bacteria into the brain, damage brain tissue or break.
Decode brain signals
Another challenge is decoding the brain signals.
In 2020, PhD student Ari Benjamin at the University of Pennsylvania explained that the biggest challenge for Neuralink would be to decode brain signals.
“Once you have captured the signals, Neuralink will need to decode them, and one day they will have challenges due to a lack of understanding of how the brain works, no matter how many neurons they receive signals from,” Benjamin said. BBC.
He pointed out that it is difficult to decode the information from the brain when you do not know which code these signals are sent in.
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Surgical precision
Previous attempts to capture and analyze brain signals through electrodes used a few hundred electrodes that made contact with the brain through the skin. The Link scales this up considerably. 3000 electrodes, which are attached to flexible wires thinner than a hair, will capture the activity of 1000 neurons in the brain.
Almost 100 such “hairs” are to be operated into the brain without destroying either the electrodes located on each “hair” and the brain cells from which the neurons are to capture information.
Understanding of diseases
Neuralink aims to help patients with diseases such as Parkinson’s, autism, depression and insomnia.
But even though Neuralink has access to centers in the brain that have to do with these diseases, there is still a lack of understanding of what these diseases are, and consequently also an understanding of how they should be treated.
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