Elon Musk’s Neuralink
Neuralink corporation is an american company that was established in July 2016 by Elon
Musk and some other partners including Ben Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Max Hodak, Paul Merolla,
Philip Sabes, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson, and Vanessa Tolosa . The company is oriented towards
the neuroscience and neurotechnology fields where it includes a team of exceptionally
talented people from all fields of expertise, that is a wide range of people with diverse
engineering, scientific and operations expertise.
The main objective of neuralink is to create the future of brain interfaces including building
devices and gadgets that will help people with paralysis and to invent new technologies
that will expand people’s cognitive abilities which eventually will enhance their community
and quality of life.
Curious to know more about how Neuralink works and what can it do?
Keep Watching!!
Two years upon its foundation, Neuralink had received approximately 158 million dollars
of which 100 million dollars was from Elon Musk and the other 58 million dollars is from
the other partners and research foundations.
The number of employees of Neuralink became around 100 in August 2020, however,The company
is a fast paced and growing organization that’s continually improving its technologies in
the neuroscience field.
The main objective of this video is to answer two questions regarding Neuralink business.
The first question is, how does it work?
And the second one is, what can it do?
Finding ways to stimulate the brain in paralysed humans in order to allow them to control computers;
is the main aim of Neuralink where they are developing ultrafine threads that can be woven
into the brains of patients to detect the neuro signals.
According to Musk, the system has been tested on a monkey that was able to control a computer
with its brain and now Neuralink has applied to US regulators to start trailing this device
on humans because their plans in the present focus on patients with severe neurological
conditions.
So how does it really work?
Well, Neuralink has developed an extremely small device called the N1 chip that is a
4mm square chip and consists of a tiny probe containing more than 3,000 electrodes which
are attached to flexible threads that can easily monitor the activity of up to 1,000
neurons.
Each one of these threads is thinner than a human hair.
This newly developed system has numerous advantages, one of which is that it would be able to target
very specific areas of the brain without compromising the integrity of the other areas, which would
make it surgically safer.
Moreover and by using machine learning, the system would be able to analyse recordings
and that would help work out what type of stimulation to give a patient.
However, Neuralink did not reveal the mechanism by which the system translated brain activity
or even the way the device stimulates brain cells.
After all, it’s a new technology that will take a long time to fulfill its purpose, so
it will not take over people’s brains all of the sudden.
However, according to Neuralink, the system would ultimately allow for symbiosis via artificial
intelligence; that is it would generate the required interaction between the brain and
AI.
At first, the N1 chips will be implanted in the patients skulls via traditional neurosurgery,
however, they aim at inserting the chips safely and virtually painlessly through very small
incisions by a robot surgeon.
Unfortunately, in order to monitor neurosignals, the N1 chip needs to be close to each nerve
at a distance less than 60 microns and beyond that distance, the chip would not be able
to detect individual impulses and will monitor noise due to the overlapping between signals
coming from different nerves.
Despite the fact that Neuralink did not reveal the way N1 chips work, it’s worth noting
that Brain-Machine interfaces work within a typical procedure.
These interfaces use electrodes in order to translate the neuronal information readings,
known as action potentials, into commands that are capable of controlling external systems
such as a computer or even a robotic arm.
In addition to that, the N1 chips are specially designed for the neurological disorders resulting
from the inability of the brain to connect with nerves around the body; such as epilepsy
and Parkinson's disease.
Moreover, they can be developed and upgraded to treat some injuries to the spinal nerves
including Paraplegia and Quadriplegia.
The brain machine interfaces or BMIs for short, are very promising devices that can be used
for the restoration and motor functions along with the treatment of neurological disorders.
However, the BMIs have not yet been clinically and widely adopted due to the fact that modest
channel counts have limited their potential.
Neuralink has its first steps toward a scalable, applicable and high bandwidth system.
Arrays of very tiny and flexible electrode threads with more than 3,072 electrodes per
array that are distributed across 96 threads, have been already built by Neuralink.
They have also built a neurosurgical robot that is capable of inserting 192 electrodes
per minute with each thread being individually inserted into the brain with the micron precision
in order to avoid any surface vasculature around the skull and also to target specific
regions around the brain.
Therefore, Neuralink’s approach to the brain machine interfaces technology has unprecedented
packaging density and scalability in a clinically relevant package where the electrode array
is packaged into a small implantable device containing custom low power on board chips
for amplification and digitalization.
That package contains 3,072 electrodes or channels and occupies less than (23*18.5*2)
cubic millimeters.
Using a very limited number of electrodes, researchers have demonstrated the potential
help that can be provided by the brain machine interfaces technology.
For example, it can help with a wide range of neurological disorders and to treat these
disorders, they have achieved speech synthesizers, robotic limbs and human neuroprosthetic control
of AI machines using less than 256 electrode channels.
However, due to the inability to record from large numbers of neurons, the development
of BMIs has been critically limited.
Some noninvasive approaches using custom electrodes are specified to average the recording of
millions of neurons through the skull but the recorded signals are distorted and nonspecific
in a way that you cannot extract useful information from them.
Therefore, Neuralink is working on swapping the custom electrodes with the microelectrodes
in order to be used in recording the action potentials.
However, there has not been a clinically translatable microelectrode technology for large scale
recordings because it would require a brain-machine interface system with some specific material
properties that provide high biocompatibility, safety and longevity.
In addition to this, the microelectrode based chip would require a highly practical and
surgical approach along with high density, low power electronics to ultimately facilitate
the fully implanted wireless operations.
Here’s a short comparison between the common electrodes and the microelectrodes developed
by Neuralink.
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When it comes to the usual brain machine interfaces, arrays of electrodes made from rigid metals
or semiconductors are used in most of the devices specified for long term neural recording.
However, the young modulus and bending stiffness of these rigid metals have significant mismatches
between stiff probes and brain tissue, which eventually can drive immune responses that
limit the functionality and longevity of these devices.
Moreover, due to the presence of surface vasculature, the populations of neurons that can be accessed
are constrained by the fixed geometry of electrode arrays.
Therefore, the alternative approach being developed by Neuralink is to use flexible
and thin multi electrode polymer probes where greater biocompatibility would be achieved
by the small size and increased flexibility of these tiny probes.
However, there is a crucial disadvantage between these polymer probes as they are simply not
stiff enough to be directly inserted into the brain.
Therefore, they must be inserted by stiffeners, injections or other approaches, which makes
the process of insertion extremely slow and inefficient which possibly can compromise
the patient’s safety.
In order to solve the stiffness problem, Neuralink has fully developed a robotic approach where
they efficiently insert large numbers of fine and flexible polymer probes across multiple
brain regions via this robotic approach.
They have made remarkable progress regarding the flexible and scalable brain machine interfaces
system that increases electrode channel count.
That system has three main components:
1- The Ultrafine Polymer Probes, which are two main types, the first is one is the linearly
edge probes containing 32 electrode channel contacts that are spaced by 50 micrometers
and the second type is the tree probes that contain 32 electrode channel contacts spaced
by 75 micrometers.
Moreover, in order to employ a variety of biocompatibility in thin film materials, Neuralink
has developed a specific process to fabricate minimally displacive neural probes.
Polyimide is the main dielectric and substrate used in these microelectrode probes where
they encapsulate a gold thin film trace and each thin film array is composed of a “thread”
area that features the electrode contacts and traces along with a sensor area where
the thin film interfaces with custom chips in order to enable signal amplification.
The high throughput manufacturing of these devices is enabled by a wafer-level microfabrication
process where ten thin film devices are patterned on a wafer, each with 3,072 electrode channels.
2- Neurosurgical Robot, which is developed by Neuralink in order to allow rapid and reliable
insertion of large numbers of polymer probes without compromising the safety of the vasculature
surface and to target very specific brain regions.
The insertion head of the robot is mounted on 10 micrometers, a (400mm*400mm*150mm) travels
three axis stages and also holds a small rapid needle pincher assembly.
The needle has a diameter of 40 micrometers made of tungsten-rhenium wire stock that is
etched to a 24 micrometers diameter along the inserted length.
The tip of the needle is specially designed to transport and insert individual threads
along with providing easy penetration of the brain tissue.
3- Custom High Density Electronics, which are based on Neuralink application specific
integrated circuits or ASIC for short.
It consists of 256 analog pixels, analog to digital converters and peripheral control
circuitry.
Upon explaining the mechanism by which Neuralink microelectrode chips work, it’s time to
imagine what they can do in the future after fully developing their technology.
With the aid of Neuralink and other similar neurotechnology companies, brain machine interfaces
would be simple tools that people would use on a daily basis.
They would be simple, convenient and easy to use as well.
Using the N1 chip, people would be able to learn how to stimulate their brain cells in
the right way to control the brain machine interface.
Moreover, neurological disorders such as paraplegia, tetraplegia, quadriplegia, Parkinson and many
other diseases would be finally cured.
Just imagine that a patient suffering from a neurological disorder or a spinal cord injury
could easily control a digital mouse and a keyboard!
The potential success of Neuralink is very high, however, it does have tangible risks
such as some Psychological and behavioral impacts including the likelihood of personality
changes, addictive behaviors and chronic psychological disorders emergence.
Moreover, imagine that it all went well and the chip is inserted safely into people’s
brains without compromising the integrity of their health and mental state, people will
be directly connected to an artificial intelligence devices that are permanently implanted in
their brains; this means that the company would have an access to your brain, just imagine
how awful it would be!!
It’s a high tech spying methodology.
If you inserted that chip in your brain one day, then you would be highly exposed to the
manufacturer, they could easily sell your personal data to other companies to use it
in marketing or building algorithms.
Imagine the fortune the company would make when considering selling people’s data to
other companies or even taking over the whole world!!
Thanks For Watching Everyone!!
In your opinion, is it ethical to use Neuralink N1 chips?
Would you let them implant it in your brain?
Do you think that merging humanity with AI is our best shot in the far future?
Let me know in the comments below, be sure to subscribe, and I’ll see you next time
on the channel!