Elon Musk announced several news about Neuralink a few hours ago.
We are talking about a company that intends to put implants in our brains to increase their capacity and be able to perform actions with the power of thought, something that they have already tested with monkeys, first playing Pong, and now writing.
The basic concepts of Neuralink are based on recording the potential actions of neurons in the brain by placing an electrode close enough to the synapse of two neurons in the brain and taking a record of their electrical impulse. They believe that in this way they can make the paralyzed able to move again, stimulating and reflecting the movement centers of the brain, where synaptic activity no longer occurs, and they would stimulate those centers through a computer.
The launch event began with a monkey typing, with its brain, on a computer screen. They have trained the monkey to react to numbers and letters on the screen, rewarding it for tracing letters and numbers and then using them to write more complicated numbers and words. In the end they manage to produce a sentence, although that does not mean that the monkey knows its meaning.
The monkey is not writing, it is thinking about the letters of the words. Here you can see it in detail:
Let’s hope that what happened to the monkeys a few months ago doesn’t happen to them.
How do you get a monkey to write?
The implant in his brain translates neural activity in an orderly fashion. The monkey learns to control the screen, thinking about the letters and they appear.
These complex organizations of neural functions are being employed through the electrodes implanted in the monkey’s brain. These electrodes are long, thin wires of metallized fibers. They are between 5 and 50 microns thick, smaller than human hair.
The electrodes are recording neural activity, the signals are released by the neurons, recorded by the chip in the computer, then mapped, organized and reproduced.
Now it’s the turn of humans
They can have ten thousand electrodes on any one electrode string, implanted by a surgical robot. The neurosurgeon prepares the patient, then the robot places the implants in the brain, all with a human volunteer receiving the technology.
Neuralink believes that it could implant one of its devices in someone’s head within the next six months, and the CEO himself plans to put it in his brain.
During the presentation, Musk said the company had submitted most of the documentation needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the United States.
