Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk recently announced that a second human has received a Neuralink cybernetic implant.
Musk, the founder of brain computing company Neuralink Corp., talked about the second successful implantation during a podcast hosted by computer scientist Lex Fridman.
“I don’t want to mislead him, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant,” Musk said. “There is a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well.”
Musk called the next steps for Neuralink “giant,” and he predicted in the coming years that the company will increase the number of electrodes dramatically and improve signal processing. The electrodes, the main components in the battery, receive brain signals that are then routed to electronics in the implant, “which process and wirelessly transmit the neural data to an instance of the Neuralink app running on an external device, such as a computer.” .
“Our brain-computer interface is fully implantable, cosmetically invisible, and designed to let you control a computer or mobile device wherever you go,” according to Neuralink’s website.
The second implant surgery was postponed in June after the patient originally scheduled to undergo the procedure had to withdraw due to an unspecified medical condition, Bloomberg reported, citing Michael Lawton, chief executive of the Barrow Neurological Institute.
When was the first Neuralink implant?
Quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh was the first man to be implanted with Neuralink. He had the procedure done earlier this year as part of a clinical trial.
Arbaugh, 30, told Bloomberg in May that the device has helped his life, allowing him to play video games and chess and surf the Internet with ease. Before the surgery, Arbaugh was still adjusting to life after a diving accident in mid-2016 that left him with a dislocated spine.
“Once you get a taste for using it, you just can’t stop,” Arbaugh said of Neuralink, per Bloomberg.
Arbaugh ran into a few problems during his Neuralink experience.
“I started to lose control of the cursor. I thought they made some changes and that was the reason,” Arbaugh said, per Bloomberg. “But then they told me the strings were being pulled from my brain. At first, they didn’t know how serious it would be. be or a ton for him.”
Like Arbaugh, Musk confirmed during the podcast that Neuralink’s second recipient had a spinal cord injury.
‘Direct procedure’
Neurosurgeon Matthew MacDougall also appeared on Fridman’s podcast and said the Neuralink surgery is “a really simple and straightforward procedure.”
“The human part of the operation I do is simple,” MacDougall said. “It is one of the most fundamental neurosurgical procedures imaginable.”
During the procedure, surgeons make an incision in the skin on the top of the head above the area of the brain that is “the most powerful representation of the hand’s intentions,” according to MacDougall.
“If you’re an expert concert pianist, this part of your brain is firing the whole time you’re playing,” he said. “We call it the hand glove.”
Even quadriplegic patients whose brains are no longer connected to their finger movements still imagine finger movements, and that part of the brain still lights up, the neurosurgeon said.
After surgeons cut that skin on the top of the head, they open it “like a car hood,” make a 1-inch-diameter round hole in the skull, remove that part of the skull, and open the lining of the skull. brain and then show that part of the brain to the Neuralink robot, according to MacDougall.
“This is where the robot shines,” he said. “She can go in and take these tiny electrodes, much smaller than a human hair, and insert them precisely into the cortex, the surface of the brain at a very precise depth, in a very precise location that avoids all the blood vessels that are. Coating the surface of the brain and after the robot is done with its part, then the human goes back and puts the implant in that hole in the skull and covers it, screwing it up to the skull and suturing the skin again. So the whole thing takes a few hours.”