Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk said a second subject is due to receive the company’s experimental brain implant soon.
in Wednesday Video UpdateMusk said the surgery is expected to take place “in the next week or so.” The company is modifying the surgical procedure and device placement to avoid issues that occurred with the first patient, whose implant partially fell off from his brain a few weeks after the procedure.
Neuralink is developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that uses a person’s brain signals to control external devices. Its first product, called Telepathy, aims to enable paralyzed people to control computers with just their thoughts. Musk said of Neuralink: I’m working on my second product.The technology is called “Blindsight,” which provides artificial vision to the visually impaired.
“Think of the Neuralink device as a Fitbit or an Apple Watch with little wires and electrodes,” Musk said in a video livestreamed on his social media platform, X. In the short term, the Neuralink device is meant to assist people with disabilities, but Musk said his long-term goal is to use BCI technology to “reduce the civilizational risks of AI by enabling a closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence.”
The company is currently conducting an initial feasibility study to evaluate the safety and functionality of the device in people with paralysis. As part of that study, Noland Arbaugh became the first person to receive a Neuralink brain implant in January. Arbaugh is paralyzed from the shoulders down after a swimming accident in 2016.
Neuralink’s coin-sized implant is embedded in the skull and has 64 flexible wire threads thinner than a human hair that extend into brain tissue. Each thread contains 16 electrodes that collect the intended action signals from neurons.
At first, the device worked fine: Mr. Arbaugh could control the cursor with his mind, playing video games, emailing friends, and browsing the Internet. But a few weeks after the operation, the implant began to malfunction, and Mr. Arbaugh could no longer control the cursor.
in May Blog Posts Neuralink said on its website that after many of the threads were pulled from Arbaugh’s brain, reducing the number of active electrodes, the company tweaked its neural recording algorithm to make it more sensitive, as well as improving the way it translates neural signals into cursor movement.
Neuralink executives say Arbaugh is now able to use his brain to compute again, but the implant’s threads are still only 15 percent functional. In an interview with WIRED, Arbaugh said the device has given him a sense of independence.
Still, Neuralink is working to prevent the same issues from occurring with its second subject. “We want to make as much progress as possible with each Neuralink subject,” Musk said Wednesday.
In a video update, company executives acknowledged that air may have become trapped inside Arbaugh’s skull after the surgery, which may have caused the threads to come loose. Matthew McDougall, Neuralink’s chief of neurosurgery, said the company is taking steps to eliminate the air pocket in the second volunteer. The company also plans to insert the threads deeper into brain tissue and track their movement.
“You might think the most obvious mitigation for threads being pulled out of the brain would be to insert the threads deeper, and that’s what we think, and we’re going to be expanding the range of depths that we insert the threads,” McDougall said.
Additionally, the company’s surgeons plan to “sculpt the surface of the skull” to minimize the gap under the implant so that the implant will fit snugly with the normal contours of the skull. McDougall said this will “minimize the gap under the implant” and “put the implant closer to the brain and relieve some of the tension on the threads.”
Musk said he hopes to implant Neuralink devices in “high single digit” study participants this year. Neuralink listing on ClinicalTrials.gov The company says it plans to enroll three participants in the current study.
Musk added that Neuralink is working on a next-generation implant with 128 threads, with eight electrodes on each thread — a change he said “that could double the bandwidth, if the placement of the threads is precise.” Musk didn’t say when the device might be ready for testing in humans.
