neuralink elon musk's brain chip company
recently pushed back on claims that it
violated animal welfare laws a few years
ago while testing on monkeys this year
the company plans to test on human
subjects but when it does what would
this major step mean for brain implant
science
academics like me have conducted
clinical trials in people with brain
implants dr paul niujukian is a
professor of bioengineering and
neurosurgery he directs the brain
interfacing laboratory at stanford
for about 20 years now academic
research brain implants
up until this point more or less have
almost exclusively been with wires the
difference that the n1 has the neural
it's fully implantable it is battery
powered it is wireless all of this is
being done over bluetooth protocol let's
dive into the science behind neuralink
to understand how exactly human brain
chips work
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the science behind how these implants
work is
not that different from how
you would go about trying to measure the
energy from a double a battery it's the
same principle that we're doing with
these brain implants this is called
neuroelectrophysiological recording when
you move your arm to the right certain
sets of neurons are activated in a
certain pattern listening in to that
activity and that pattern you can
predict very quickly which direction the
arm is going to move these are the
neurons that are directly wired to your
muscle
unless that pathway from the brain to
the spinal cord to the muscle is damaged
the way it is in patients with paralysis
that pathway is damaged then the neural
signals those signals from the brain
aren't going to get down to move the
muscles but in many cases the signals
are still present in the brain they're
just not getting out so if you reach in
and put something that listens in to
those neurons and you know what's
happening to the muscle and that's the
goal of a brain implant now let's look
at a timeline of brain interface
breakthroughs over the years scholars
have long been interested in how the
brain works so it's important to view
these new developments at neuralink as a
culmination of breakthroughs by brain
machine interface researchers especially
in the last few decades for example in
2002 the first demonstration of
real-time cursor control in monkeys took
place
2008 a monkey controlling a robotic arm
in three dimensions fed itself 2012 the
first brain controlled robotic arm by a
human
2017 a human controlled a cursor
mentally to type out words and sentences
dr nijukiyan was part of the study as
well as the one in 2018 where a human
subject mentally controlled a tablet to
do things like browse the web send
emails and play games or music
all that's been done with a couple
hundred electrodes
but in 2019 neuralink a private company
changed the game when it unveiled a pig
named gertrude with a wireless implant
that monitored about a thousand neurons
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the neurons are like wiring
and
you kind of need an electronic thing to
solve an electronic problem that was a
very interesting moment because it
signaled to the community that they're
serious they're investing they're
building hardware from scratch and
they're putting it in large animals for
the pig the electrodes were implanted in
somatosensory cortex allowing them to
measure sensory activity like that of
taking a step every time that that
particular neuron they were listening to
fired you would hear this little pop or
click from the audio channel and so the
moment i heard it right it's like oh
yeah hold they got neurons you just
recognize it instantly you know what
neurons sound like if you've been
listening to them for decades and that's
what they were communicating right they
were they were telling the field we've
got neurons pay attention and overnight
it seemed the industry took notice then
in april of 2021 neurolink released the
so-called mind pong video pager was the
name it's a rhesus macaque which is you
know the type of monkey that is very
commonly used in this field implanted
with two of the n1 devices the neural
link devices performing brain control of
a cursor on screen that's extremely
significant because
here neurolink is showing their new
hardware their new device in their hands
works in a monkey that's
the level
that's necessary to convince the
scientific community to convince the fda
that
you're ready to go into human clinical
trials that's the evidence the fda is
looking for the recording power of the
n1 device in pager was eye opening
because of the sheer number of
individual electrodes that had been
implanted there was definitely a lot of
clever engineering that went in to that
to build a device that can transmit 2048
electrodes worth of spiking information
right of digital ones and zeros of
spikes over a radio wirelessly and when
you have that many channels the
performance that you should be able to
get should eclipse what we've been able
to do in the academic field
you know the maximum number of
electrodes i've ever recorded from is
two to three hundred so with all those
electrodes how does a device like the n1
get implanted in a subject's brain
make no mistake this is neurosurgery it
is not a joke this requires cutting the
skin
getting down to skull drilling a hole in
the skull exposing what's called the
dura which is this protective layer of
tissue that surrounds the brain cutting
the dura folding it back to expose the
brain and then you get to the surface of
the brain where you can implant the
electrodes
the biggest risks with these types of
techniques are infection
bleeding and tissue damage so what would
it take for the fda to approve clinical
trials in humans the neurolink device
are called class 3 medical devices they
they are implantable and they're going
into very sensitive body cavities that
is the highest level of scrutiny that
the fda
assigns to medical devices they don't
have a predecessor there's no previous
example that's approved and so very
appropriately they got a high bar they
have to cross in order to get it
approved so what neurolink has to do
next is prepare a very long and
technical document with all the evidence
from animal studies that their device is
safe and effective this document is
submitted to the fda who has 90 days to
review and give them an answer if the
fda says yes then their clinical trial
is approved and neurolink can enroll and
recruit human participants we're on the
cusp of a complete paradigm shift
this type of technology has the
potential to transform our treatments
not just for stroke and paralysis and
degenerative disease motor degenerative
diseases but also for pretty much every
other type of brain disease from
parkinson's
to epilepsy
to dementias alzheimer's and even
psychiatric disease
seeing neuralink and the other companies
in this space start an industry around
neuroengineering brain machine
interfaces neuroprosthetics
has been a tremendous amount of
validation for
neuroscientists and engineers who have
been working in this space
for decades how much happier could the
scientific community be than to give
birth
to an industry
so will this industry someday lead to
the creation of cyborg humans with
superhuman intelligence
there's all sorts of wild speculation in
our field i think science fiction is
wonderful at telling very creative and
captivating stories
about all sorts of things including
including brain machine interfaces the
reality is we are in such early stages
of this space right where we are just
barely able to record from neurons that
control muscles and try to interpret
something
meaningful information out of that
we're going to be in that space for
decades uh that's where i will focus
much of my career is understanding
what's going on with these neurons and
the circuits that they are working on
that's where the last 15 years of my
work has been and the coming several
decades of my work will focus in on this
space because that's going to be the
forefront of neuroscience
the rest
i think is fun to think about but i
don't see how that's going to be
in the foreseeable future
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