Elon Musk’s Neuralink In A Pig: Working Of The Neuralink Brain Implant
Elon Musk demonstrates his ambitious plans to create a working brain-to-machine interface as he unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized computer chip in her brain.
People with neurological conditions could control computers or phones with their minds using this interface. To help cure conditions such as spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia, such chips could eventually be used, argues Mr. Musk.
In Friday’s webcast demo, Gertrude was one of three pigs involved. On a graph tracking her neural activity, the activity showed up when she ate and sniffed straw, though she took a while to get going. When looking for food, neural activity in her snout was indicated as the processor in her brain sends wireless signals.
Last year, his start-up, Neuralink, founded in 2017, applied to launch human trials. The original Neuralink device had been simplified and made smaller, said Mr. Musk, and added saying, “It could be under your hair and you wouldn’t know as it fits quite nicely in your skull.”
On a webcast, the billionaire entrepreneur said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires.”
Containing more than
3,000 electrodes, the device consists of a tiny probe and has flexible threads thinner than a human hair attached to these electrodes, which can monitor 1,000 brain neurons’ activity.The sheer complexity of the human brain could be the real stumbling block for the technology, said Ari Benjamin, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kording Lab, ahead of the webcast. He said, “Once they have the recordings, no matter how many neurons they record from, Neuralink will need to decode them. Eventually, someday it will hit the barrier that is our lack of basic understanding of how the brain works. When the neural code in which those things are communicated are not understood, it is hard to decode goals and movement plans.”
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Elon Musk’s Neuralink In A Pig: Working Of The Neuralink Brain Implant Demonstrated
