Neuralink: Merging Man and Machine

You know, monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain. Just yeah, so your brain is composed of neurons. Neurons connect together and form a network that can talk to each other through synapses. They're the connection points between neurons, and they communicate using chemical signals known as neurotransmitters.

All of your senses, everything you experience in life, it's all just neurons firing electrical signals, or otherwise known as action potentials. When neuron spikes occur, these neurotransmitters are released. Information is then relayed across its synapses and eventually reaches another neuron. Now multiply this process by a hundred billion, and that's your brain in a nutshell.

Electrodes are the way that Neuralink and other medical practices study your brain activity. By placing these electrodes close to neurons, the action potentials that create electric fields inside your brain can be detected and transferred to a machine that records and measures the data. Neuralink plans to use this to its advantage.

Your brain has two main systems: your limbic system and your cortex. These two are in a relationship with each other. Your limbic system is responsible for your basic emotions, mere survival instinct. Your cortex is responsible for your problem-solving skills, your critical thinking. It's where your consciousness exists.

Neuralink is aiming to create a third layer to this. The implants will be a third wheel in this relationship but would increase our capabilities by multiple orders of magnitude. They plan to increase the number of neurons that you can access regularly, then you can use to remember things or regain access to certain parts of your brain that may no longer be active. This is extremely useful for medical patients, some of which we had absolutely zero options for until Neuralink became a reality.

The goal is to make this one of the most simple procedures there is, similar to people getting LASIK to improve their vision. But why do we even need this in the first place? Well, in most cases, it's a bandwidth issue. Now, many people hear this but don't exactly understand what that means.

It's a speed problem; it's an energy problem. It's how fast you can get information into or out of your brain. If you have something that you want to write down on a computer, you have to type it with your hands or speak it into a microphone; that's probably going to mess it up. If you want to learn something, it could take days, weeks, months, or even years to fully grasp.

If we were able to solve this bandwidth issue, we could accomplish exponentially more in time with much less physical effort. Neuralink cuts out the middleman and allows input and output directly from your brain to whatever you're doing on a machine, or vice versa. It's like going from writing using a quill to having a pencil, to having a keyboard, to having Siri. So now, potentially having nothing but the power of your own brain.

This is where brain-machine interfaces come in, and they change everything. A brain-machine interface, or BMI, is composed of two things: a brain and a machine. The machine can be anything—a phone, a computer, a bionic arm—anything that provides you with sensory inputs from the outside world or an external source.

These inputs are then returned back into your brain, where you can process them, but you need something artificial in your head to return this data to. Now don’t worry, it's not like putting a CPU inside your head; it's actually quite tiny. Each Neuralink chip is roughly four by four millimeters with a thousand electrodes each.

It's feasible to fit up to ten of these inside your head in different areas, all to measure and affect different parts of your brain. But companies and neurosurgeons alike can't just go around throwing anything they want into someone's head. It's usually a lengthy process to get these things approved by the FDA for medical purposes and later on public use.

BMIs contain the potential to help people with a wide range of clinical disorders. Using just 256 electrodes, or about two-and-a-half percent the number of electrodes Neuralink eventually plans to use, human patients have been able to control computer cursors, robotic limbs, and speech synthesizers. The full potential with nearly 40 times that amount of electrodes is hard to imagine.

Currently, the best FDA-approved BMI is used for Parkinson's patients, and it only has ten electrodes. For Neuralink, this is just the beginning and it's already a thousand times better than what is currently approved. In version one, each electrode is inserted into your head via tiny threads that are roughly 5 micrometers thick.

They're around ten times smaller than a human hair and contain 32 electrodes each; it's roughly the same size as a neuron, which is a good idea. There's a size limit for things that you want to stick in your head; something too large is inevitably going to cause problems, so the smaller, the better.

Neuralink actually made a robot that is used to insert these with extreme precision, which is pretty much mandatory. Humans couldn't do it if they wanted. This is a penny; it's pretty small, right? It's roughly the same size as the tip of my thumb. Now zooming in extremely close, this right here is the needle that will be inserted into your skull.

Placing it beside a penny, you actually couldn't see it as the robot inserts each thread one by one. At the end, there could eventually be up to 10,000 of these electrodes inside your head, each responsible for recording separate neurons which can later on be analyzed. But not only can they read data from your brain, they can also input data as well.

It's a two-way street; it's sort of like being able to upload and download things from your brain. Brain implants aren't exactly new either, though they go as far back as the 1950s. Hearing implants are a good example. Neuralink just plans to take the baton and continue down the path but in a different way.

Other BMIs approach the situation differently. For deep brain stimulation, the kind of implants that were used to assist Parkinson’s patients that I mentioned before, they essentially used larger, stiff needles that were pretty much just shoved into the brain to affect neural activity, just as the electrodes from Neuralink will.

It works well, but there's a pretty high probability that complications will occur over time—seizures, strokes, and even more. It may fix one issue, but it's probable that multiple other issues will show up. Your brain doesn't sit still inside your head; it moves around with you. Even if you think you're sitting still, your brain moves with each breath, each heartbeat.

This is what can cause issues and is why a robot is needed for Neuralink's procedure to be successful. Neuralink is taking a different approach, and it really isn't even a huge surgery. Your head isn't going to be completely peeled open for these chips to be inserted; each chip will be inserted into your head through a small incision of eight millimeters at most, so less than a centimeter.

You won't need stitches; you won't need any of that. It's hardly a surgery at all. By the way, those chips that are inserted are completely wireless, as you would probably hope. The craziest thing of all is that you won't need to go to a hospital or random place to hook yourself up to use this interface.

There's no USB port sticking out of your head. You will need a caretaker or anyone to help you with the use of a single wireless battery-powered computer behind your ear that will actually be able to connect you to your smartphone, effectively making your phone an official part of you.

The options and potentials for this technology are limitless and are only going to improve over time. Now, I don't want to overreach here and throw out ideas that are impossible, so I won't, but I will give some solid uses and some pretty cool ideas for Neuralink that can actually become a reality one day.

This is my computer; Ironside sent it to me a couple of months back and it's great for everything I need to do. It has a twenty ATI graphics card, an i-9 processor, and 64 gigabytes of RAM. I can edit much faster and more efficiently than I was able to before. I can play pretty much any game on Ultra settings, but in order to do these things, I need to use my hands—no duh.

I need to use a mouse and a keyboard to get things done in the way I want or to move my character in games. But Neuralink may be able to change this. If a patient is able to control an arm with his or her mind, then it's not unfeasible to believe that one day you may be able to control characters and video games with your brain as well, considering it's all Bluetooth, all wireless.

It's not too much of a stretch to ask this. Coupled with advancements in virtual reality will cause video games and potentially even films to become almost fully immersive. Let's take an example of where Neuralink technology could be used in a pretty cool yet practical way.

Let’s say you're about to take a month-long trip to Tokyo. You're an American, and as most Americans, most of us only speak one language. We'll have no clue how to get around any city that doesn't have street signs or directions completely in English. But luckily, Neuralink can help us out here.

Imagine there's a Tokyo local who's lived there his entire life looking at the action potentials of that particular person, studying their neuron spikes in a region of their brain called the hippocampus, and in which order they occur. You can trace out a path throughout the entire city from when these neurons spike, and once this data is input into your brain, you'll be able to traverse the city like you've lived there your entire life.

Telepathy is no longer unrealistic. The electrode implants that detect neural signals wirelessly transmit their data back to the small computer behind your ear, so the idea of transferring data back and forth between these devices is relatively simple to imagine. And because the electrodes can both read and write data, you could theoretically communicate back and forth between people who also have Neuralink implants.

Now, at the moment, this technology isn't exactly close to making this happen—maybe a word or two—but in theory and with enough improvements, it is possible for high-bandwidth communication between two people using nothing but their minds. It may be an aggressive approach, as Elon tends to take, but you can see Neuralink implants in human patients by the end of this year.

And once that happens, it's only up from there. Improvements will slowly be added, and I can honestly see this becoming a big and common practice within the next couple of decades. You always hear that there's new technology coming out that will change our lives, but I'm serious when I say this.

If this is taken seriously and can work in the ways we're studying and planning on at the moment, I see this as an invention that is on the scale of the Internet. It will change the world the way airplanes impacted travel, the way antibiotics impacted medicine. Computers and the Internet threw us into a brand new digital age.

Phones and computers have become extensions of human beings; they can answer almost any question you could ask at a moment's notice. They've both been pivotal in connecting the entire planet, while minds like the one Neuralink are creating are going to have a similar, and honestly even larger, effect than that.

As time goes on, as we enter our new decade, technology that we've passed off as unrealistic becomes more and more plausible. Things that we've written off as impossible end up being the same things that push society forward. Airplanes, rockets, medicine—all things that used to be seen as wizardry or some voodoo magic are now things that we use every single day.

As Neuralink progresses and gets better and better, its cultural impact will grow larger and larger. Kids being born today will grow up in a world vastly different than the one we're living in today. The same way that we're living through a time vastly different than the previous generations.

We will make mistakes along the way; the past shows that pretty well. However, humans overcome. We adapt and we move forward. If you think we're living in the peak of the digital age, you have no idea what's just around the corner.

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