Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink says it's first human patient is recovering after being implanted with a device which helps them communicate through a phone or computers.
According to Musk’s social media messages the first patients being fitted with the implant will be those who’ve lost use of their limbs.
According to Musk’s social media messages the first patients being fitted with the implant will be those who’ve lost use of their limbs.
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00:00 Your brain sends neural signals and their electrical signals go from one brain cell,
00:05 one neuron to another.
00:07 And when those signals are transmitted, you can record the electrical activity.
00:11 You can record it very precisely with electrodes that you implant in the brain, like these
00:15 brain computer interfaces, or you can get sort of an aggregate of the brain signals
00:19 by taking a surface recording.
00:22 And what that does normally is those electrical signals, for example, from your motor cortex,
00:26 will travel down to your spinal cord and send that signal to a motor neuron in your spinal
00:31 cord and that flexes your muscle.
00:32 Your brain has 100 billion of these neurons all talking to each other and firing, and
00:37 you have developed this phenomenally complex nervous system and evolved it to work.
00:42 But what we have to do when you're just getting little signals, just like a little spike from
00:47 these neurons, is the computer has to interpret what that means.
00:50 So you have to train the computer to say, "When I am moving my left foot or thinking
00:54 about moving my left foot, this is what those signals look like."
00:58 What a spike is and what electrophysiologists and neuroscientists call spikes are when a
01:03 neuron fires.
01:04 So your neurons in your brain are receiving signals from other cells all the time, and
01:08 if they get a strong enough signal, they send an action potential, which we call a spike,
01:13 and that sends a signal down a long wire to a different neuron.
01:16 And so that's an electrical signal that you can measure.
01:19 So these devices are just hearing that electrical signal, that one big spike, and what you can
01:24 do then, that's an electrical signal that's almost like if you're pushing a button on
01:27 your computer.
01:28 Every time you heard a beep, if you pushed a button on your computer, you could cause
01:31 your computer to do something.
01:33 So the part from the signal being interpreted by the brain-computer interface and how it
01:39 influences something outside of your body is a lot like a Wi-Fi signal.
01:43 So I think Neuralink says they have no wires, so I assume it's a wireless signal.
01:47 So they'll take those electrical signals, the computer will decode them and say, "This
01:51 person is thinking about moving the mouse to the right."
01:54 That electrical signal then goes, it's just like putting a robot and moving your mouse
01:58 to the right.
01:59 So it's just an electrical impulse, the way we would program a computer or a robot to
02:03 do anything.
02:04 The complex bit is interpreting the brain signal so that you can tell that robot or
02:09 that machine what to do.
02:11 There was a fascinating case published last year in Switzerland, a man who was completely
02:15 paralyzed and had one of these early brain-computer interfaces experimentally implanted in his
02:20 brain, recording from the part of the brain that controls movement.
02:24 And then a very advanced machine learning, so artificial intelligence algorithm, interpreted
02:28 those signals and sent them directly to his spinal cord below where the injury was so
02:32 he could walk.
02:33 So this is how amazing neuroscience is that even in, only in trials so far, but you can
02:38 actually decode what the brain is saying now and use that to generate movement.
02:42 This is a similar principle to Neuralink, these ideas that you can help people speak.
02:47 I've seen several studies, some of which use non-invasive methods like scalp electrodes
02:52 to record brain activity or functional MRI, so a brain scan essentially.
02:57 And that's a little bit less precise than sticking an electrode directly into your brain
03:01 and recording a signal.
03:02 But what it is allowing people to do in collaboration with these hugely powerful computer systems
03:08 is for people to think about words and those to be interpreted by the computer.
03:12 And then, you know, you could use that to type or to generate speech.
03:15 So this is research that's coming along and it's fascinating.
03:19 It's not in the studies I've read, perfect by any means.
03:22 So one of the studies I read could only accurately interpret 50% of the words someone was thinking.
03:27 So it's not perfect yet, but it's part of the direction the field is going.
03:32 So just this idea that understanding the brain and neuroscience and bringing that together
03:36 with artificial intelligence and computers is really going to, I think, start making
03:40 a difference in people's lives, both, as you say, in moving if you've had an injury and
03:46 in speaking if you can't speak for some reason, like a stroke or things like that.
03:50 I have heard that they're recruiting people who have ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
03:56 or some types of paralysis.
03:57 So I'm guessing that in the future, they won't just be using the Neuralink to tell your phone
04:03 what to do or to move a cursor on a computer screen or play a game, but to actually send
04:07 the signals to a robot or send the signals to a prosthetic limb, for example, or even
04:11 if they follow what this group in Switzerland did, you could directly stimulate the spinal
04:15 cord if that's intact.
04:17 Clinicians who work in Parkinson's disease have been able to treat Parkinson's symptoms
04:21 by directly stimulating the brain, and that stops some of the motor symptoms.
04:25 So as you know, in Parkinson's, you have a tremor sometimes, trouble initiating movement,
04:29 and by directly stimulating part of the brain with electrodes that are quite similar to
04:33 the brain-computer interfaces,
04:34 you can alleviate some of the symptoms.