Brain chip: Musk says patient moved mouse – 02/20/2024 – Tech

The owner and founder of Neuralink, Elon Musk, stated this Monday (19) that the first human patient who received a brain implant from a Neuralink chip was able to control a mouse using only his thoughts.

Furthermore, Musk stated that the patient appears to have recovered completely. “Progress is good, and the patient appears to have recovered completely, with no side effects that we are aware of. The patient is able to move a mouse across the screen just by thinking,” Musk said using the social media platform X’s Spaces, formerly Twitter .

Musk stated that Neuralink is trying to get the patient to perform as many mouse button clicks as possible.

The company was contacted by Reuters, but did not immediately respond to a request for more information.

The company successfully implanted a chip in its first human patient last month, after receiving approval to recruit and test the equipment in humans in September 2023.

The study uses a robot to surgically place an implant, using a brain-machine interface technique, into a region of the brain that controls intention to move, Neuralink said, adding that the initial goal is to allow people to control a cursor. or a computer keyboard using your thoughts.

Musk has big ambitions for Neuralink, saying it would facilitate rapid surgical insertions of its chip devices to treat conditions such as obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia.

Neuralink, which was valued at around US$5 billion (around R$24.65 billion) last year, has faced repeated criticism over its security protocols and also the invention. One of them is the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, who stated in an interview with Sheet that the implant does not bring advancement or innovation.

“The vast majority of paralysis cases can be treated with non-invasive interfaces as we have demonstrated over the last ten years; they [a Neuralink] are living on hype and bad sci-fi [ficção científica ruim]”, stated Nicolelis, who invented a machine that uses the same technique adopted by Neuralink.

The brain-machine interface began to be addressed by Nicolelis in studies in 1999, after years of collecting neural activity signals from rats and monkeys. The first successful experiment on primates dates back to 2002.

Nicolelis’ group, unlike Neuralink’s approach, placed its chips on exoskeletons, used to aid the mobility of people with paraplegia or quadriplegia. In 2014, a volunteer kicked a ball during the opening of the World Cup in Brazil, at Arena Corinthians, with one of the equipment developed by Nicolelis.

Today, in Brazil, there are already medical units that use exoskeletons to treat people with paralysis. One of them is the Lucy Montoro Rehabilitation Network, in Vila Mariana, which has equipment from the French company Wandercraft and the Russian ExoAtlet.

Video of Senator Mara Gabrilli walking with the help of a Wandercraft exoskeleton went viral on the networks last year.

In the case of these devices, the movement sensor is located on the neck.

Also in 2004, researchers led by engineer Kevin Warwick also made a neural implant from an electrode plate. The method became known as the Utah Matrix and was more invasive.

Warwick did several tests with the machine implant itself. In 2004, he published the book “I, Cyborg” (I, cyborg, in free translation), in which he reports the results of risky experiments.

The technique was improved and later used by another neuroscience research center at the University of Pittsburgh.

The first human to receive an implant in Pittsburgh was Nathan Copeland, who underwent surgery in 2014. Paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident, Copeland was able to move a mechanical arm, control a computer and play video games with thoughts.

In 2022, the American broke the record for the person with the longest exposure to the procedure called the Utah Matrix, after seven years and three months of implementation.

The implant in Copeland’s head is about the size of an eraser. Newer chips are smaller.

How is the implant tested by Musk’s company

Neuralink, for example, uses a robot to surgically place a brain-machine interface implant in a region of the brain that controls the intention to move, the motor cortex.

The chips are so small and sensitive that they cannot be implanted by human hands, according to the Neuralink website.

According to the company, the device contains more than a thousand electrodes, well above that recorded in other implants. It also targets individual neurons, contrary to competition that targets signals from groups of neurons. If it works, this should allow for a greater degree of accuracy.

In Nicolelis’ assessment, there is no market for these implants. “The vast majority of patients do not want to undergo neurosurgery and take risks.”

“Apart from Musk’s misleading marketing, he is not producing anything new or innovative in the field,” he added.

_{With information from Pedro S. Teixeira and Reuters}