Neuralink, a 2 year old company of Elon Musk, had an invite only get together at a livestreamed event yesterday. And the event was at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. In the event where thousands of brains came together, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, made an announcement.
He described his firm’s goal of using tiny electrodes implanted in the brain to “cure important diseases”. And achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence. But he didn’t share many details about the project.
Yet, he used the first rodent data from ultrasmall electrodes at the event. And Musk also revealed in this event attended by many companies including start up program companies in Toronto gta, that the company used its own device to allow a monkey to control a computer with its brain. The company’s goal is to implant super small electrodes into a person down with paralysis.
The firm wants to do the experiment on someone who is already paralysed by a spinal cord injury. And they want to do it by 2020. Even Neuralink’s head surgeon – Matthew MacDougall of California Pacific Medical Center said that they hadn’t received the permission from U.S Food and Drug Administration yet.
In its first generation, Neuralink has a chip that contains neuron sized polymer threads that a surgical robot would stitch into the brain. Also, the company released a white paper few days back. The white paper said how the company used this system to record thousands of its electrode threads in a living rat.
Other than Neuralink many other groups unveiled the ultra-small electrical probes whose designs minimize the brain tissue damage. But Neuralink did a commendable job when it put thousands of electrodes together. Even Cynthis Chestek, a neural engineer at the University of Michigan said that-“This is by far the largest channel-count system using neural scale probes.”
She also focused on how increasing the longevity of the system is the next step in Neuralink’s big game. “They need to make sure that the system lasts for decades”, is what she said.
