Elon Musk, who has tackled a lot of future-looking ventures including space travel, electric cars, solar power storage, and commuter tunnels has now added Bluetooth-enabled implantable chips for the brain to his line of technology offerings.
A CBS SF Bay Area report said that this Silicon Valley high tech guru's Neuralink has released a video as shown on the YouTube video below, showing a monkey that appears to play the 'Pong' computer game using only its mind.
The nine-year-old male macaque, identified with the name, 'Pager,' as shown on the video, has a Neuralink device embedded in both sides of its brain.
Currently, Nueralink is devising an implantable chip that can communicate with computers through a tiny receiver and has earlier demonstrated the technology in pigs.
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Musk tweeted, the device’s first iteration would allow an individual who has paralysis to use a smartphone with his mind faster than a person who uses his thumbs.
Describing Pager, the Macaque
Describing Pager, the macaque, the narrator in the video said that the animal has learned to interact with a computer "for tasty banana smoothie delivered through a straw" and is moving an on-screen cursor with a joystick.
The pair of Neuralink devices record brain activity through over 2,000 tiny electrodes embedded in the motor cortex of Pager, which regulates and arm movements.
Essentially, Neuralink is feeding the information from the neurons of the monkey into a decoder, which can be utilized for the prediction of the intended hand movements of Pager, as well as model the link between brain and movements of the joystick.
The narrator in the video explained that after a brief period of calibration, the output from the decoder can be utilized for the cursor to move, instead of the nine-year-old macaque manipulating the joystick.
Then, the joystick, as shown in the video, is disconnected and Pager moves the cursor through the use of only his brain.
Goal to Help People with Paralysis
The narrator of the video continued to explain that the main goal here is to allow an individual with paralysis to use a phone or computer with his brain activity alone.
Also explained in the video is that people would be able to regulate their decoder by imagining their hand movements. This CBS report also said that Musk discussed plans for the devices as well on his Twitter post late this week.
Specifically, Musk tweeted, the device's first iteration would allow an individual who has paralysis to use a smartphone with his mind faster than a person who uses his thumbs.
He also said, later versions will be able to shunt signals in Neuralink in the brain to Neuralink in body motor or sensory neuron clusters, thus allowing, for instance, paraplegics to walk again.
Brain-Machine Interface
Neuralink, a neural tech firm which Musk co-founded in 2016, as earlier mentioned, has been working on the so-called 'brain-machine interface,' that consists of a small chip embedded in the skull that can write and read activity of the brain.
A Business Insider reported in August 2020, Musk described this tiny chip Neuralink exhibited during a live demo, as being akin to a Fitbit in one's skull which had tiny wires.
The chip with a size similar to a coin connects to an ultra-thin flexible wire, with each wire having roughly five microns for thickness, and about 20 times thinner compared to that of a human hair. These microns contain about 1,024 electrodes in all, and they fan out within the brain.
Such electrodes can read, or theoretically write activity of the brain by sensing or activating neurons, all as they transmit the data wirelessly through Bluetooth-like radio waves in order for researchers to assess it.
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