Neuralink is an Elon Musk company that uses patches on the brain with the aim of improving its functioning, treating diseases and even working with prostheses and computers using only thought.
We saw the results a few months ago when a monkey began to play Pong without using its hands, only with the wires coming out of the brain, an experiment that generated some controversy when it was discovered that some animals died shortly after.
The fact is that the co-founder and former president of Neuralink, Max Hodak, has created the company Science Corp, also specialized in brain-computer interface, with an investment of 160 million dollars, although in this case with a very big advantage: it does not need piercing the head, it does it all by emitting light into the brain (entering through the eye).
The proposed system uses light sent through the patient’s optic nerve to transmit information, something that could serve both to treat patients with extreme disabilities and, in the future, to improve cognition and calculation abilities of humans.
They already have a prototype they call “Science Eye”, and it is capable of treating vision loss in rabbits. The system uses a thin, 2-millimeter-wide LED film implanted on top of the retina, and is capable of processing patterns sent to it wirelessly.
Human testing is still a few years away, as FDA approval is needed.
They believe that in the future it will be possible to replace the glasses, as well as the Virtual Reality ones, only with a small implant in the eye.
While Elon Musk believes that Neuralink could transform humans into cyborgs, Hodak at the moment is only thinking about treating diseases and increasing our computing power, which is already a lot.
