Neuralink Explained - Is Elon Musk Trying to Hack Us or Back Us?

By Safa Ghanem

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On the last Friday in August, the scientific world eagerly tuned into a livestream hosted by CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, who debuted the highly anticipated live demonstration of Neuralink. The concept of this wireless brain implant has been described by Musk as having a ‘Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires’ that might eventually allow us as a species to access and control our brains. Before your imagination runs wild with science fiction implications, it is worth keeping in mind that the possible application of this device would more immediately be used for individuals with brain and spinal cord injuries – Neuralink may help them interact more easily with prosthetics, computers and even smartphones, revolutionising how they can live their lives. However Musk did list some other exciting future possibilities using Neuralink such as: summoning your Tesla with your thoughts, storing or inserting a memory from a digital file, playing video games in your head and even going as far as suggesting it could be used to cure mental health conditions like anxiety or depression. With so many exciting possible future breakthroughs this could help humanity make, you can understand why Musk held this presentation to attract the top engineers to help him work on the project.

The device itself is an implant in the brain that uses chips and thousands of electrodes to connect humans to computers. Musk explained how the team so far have built ‘arrays of small and flexible electrode threads, with as many as 3072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads’. A robotic device has also been designed which is ‘capable of inserting 6 threads per minute’ with each thread being able to be ‘individually inserted into the brain with micron precision for avoidance of surface vasculature and targeting specific brain regions’. The implantation process was described by Musk as something that could take only an hour to be performed by a robotic arm, allowing the patient to leave hospital on the same day. A small incision would be made in the skull where the implant is placed on the brains outer (cortical) surface and the incision closed with superglue. The implants can amplify the very faint brain waves allowing them to be digitised. However, given the inherent faintness of brain waves, any noise can disrupt the entire system. Each of the 1500 electrodes record the signals being sent between neurons (which instruct the brain) allowing for greater understanding of all different parts of the brain and the signals which run through it.

The road to controlling computers with our brains is far from a smooth one. As you can imagine, there are many hurdles Musk and his team will need to clear before being able to roll this out. The use of Neuralink requires brain surgery which is an extremely dangerous task including the need to drill holes in the brain as well as carefully placing the implants. With a deadline of a 2021 launch, Musk’s team will need to acquire all the necessary FDA approval in record breaking time.

Previous trials of the Neuralink took place on monkeys, with Musk announcing that the team has managed to get a monkey to use its brain to control a computer. Although genetically similar, the human brain is far more complicated than that of a monkey, as well as each brain being distinct from the next, bringing a plethora of other challenges.

All of those tuning into the stream eagerly anticipated the live demonstration which Musk called the ‘three little pigs’ demo, which as you can tell from the name used three pigs called Joyce, Dorothy and Gertrude. Joyce has no implants and was used to show what a pig normally looks like – she was the control. Dorothy had previously had the implant for a set period, having it removed before the demonstration to exhibit that the insertion and removal of the implant was a safe process for the individual. However, the ‘star’ of the show was Gertrude who had a 23x8mm Neuralink implanted for the past two months. A series of beeps were played to the audience allowing them to hear Gertrude’s brain activity in real time. As she moved around the stage and interacted with things, spikes of activity were detected and recorded on the screen. The most impressive part of the pig demonstration was a pre-recorded video which showed the Neuralink signals being read by a computer which then predicted Gertrude’s movement with high accuracy. This newfound potential for understanding the human brain in so much more detail may finally lead us to unify artificial intelligence and the human psyche and consciousness.

If we take Neuralink at face value, we could perhaps realise its claims for potentially allowing brain signals to successfully travel around the body restoring the function of damaged nerves. This would be the greatest step forward in the treatment of Alzheimer’s and dementia to date; with this the future seems bright for humanity. Or is it? Even if the claims are substantiated by further medical research there remain many obstacles for the team to overcome: medical and surgical risks, approval from the necessary associations but also the morals behind this. The ethics behind others having access and potential control over your thoughts, feelings and actions could prove to be a great source of controversy – if in the wrong hands could this life saving technology prove to be far more sinister than Musk’s original intentions?