Neuralink: what can Elon Musk’s company’s brain chips do?

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Startup opened registrations from patients interested in participating in the first human trials. Chip was created to help people with paralysis control devices with their thoughts. Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, also invests and founded brain chip company REUTERS/ Gonzalo Fuentes Billionaire Elon Musk wants to implant chips in people with cerebral palsy so they can control objects with their thoughts. Through his startup, Starlink, he announced the opening of registrations for interested patients. The company received approval from the United States in May to begin testing on humans. On Tuesday (19), it was the turn of an independent council to give the green light for the recruitment of study participants. The expectation is that the technology will have transformative impacts on health. “The future is going to be strange,” said Elon Musk in 2020, when explaining the potential of Neuralink’s brain chips. For the past seven years, the company has been developing a computer chip designed to be implanted in the brain, where it monitors the activity of thousands of neurons. The chip – officially considered a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) – is a small probe containing more than 3,000 electrodes attached to flexible wires thinner than a human hair. Musk wants to connect the brain with computers to allow information and memories to be downloaded from the depths of the mind, like in the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix. In addition to trying to treat conditions such as blindness and paralysis, Musk plans to use the Neuralink chip to achieve human telepathy, which he said would help humanity prevail in a war against artificial intelligence. Science fiction or reality? Is this viable? Short answer: no. “We can’t read people’s minds. The amount of information we can decode from the brain is very limited,” says Giacomo Valle, a neural engineer at the University of Chicago, in the United States. Juan Alvaro Gallego, ICC researcher at Imperial College London, in the United Kingdom, agrees. “The fundamental problem is that we don’t really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can’t read thoughts if we don’t understand the neuroscience behind them,” he told DW. ‘They look at me strangely’: Brazilians tell what it’s like to have a chip in their hand Chip (or Brain Computer Interface) from Neuralink is a small probe with more than 3,000 electrodes developed to monitor the activity of neurons Disclosure/Neuralink Clinical use of chips Musk presented Neuralink technology in 2019, showing a pig with a chip implanted in its brain and a video of a monkey playing pong with its mind. But the potential of the technology goes far beyond animals playing. According to Gallego, the technology was initially developed to help people paralyzed by spinal injuries or conditions such as locked-in syndrome – when a patient is fully conscious but cannot move any part of their body except their eyes – to communicate. “If you [pudesse] translating your internal communication into words on a computer would be life-changing,” Gallego said. In this type of case, the chips are designed to record electrical signals from neurons in the motor cortex and then send the signals to a computer where are displayed as text. Normally, the motor cortex is not involved in thinking. Instead, it is where movement instructions are sent to the body, such as the movements of the tongue and jaw muscles when speaking. What the electrodes actually they record is a motor plan – more precisely, the result of all the processing in different parts of the brain (sensory, linguistic, cognitive) necessary to move or speak. ICCs do not record thoughts, but rather the brain’s plan to move a finger, a leg, or opening your mouth to make a sound. “Scientists have also shown that they can read the motor cortex’s intention to draw a letter,” Gallero said. “Using complex modeling [com o computador conectado], this allowed paralyzed participants to type 10 words per minute, which was a breakthrough.” Why do Brazilians accept iris scanning in a project by the creator of ChatGPT? Elon Musk is the owner of Neurolink, a brain chip startup Reuters/Dado Ruvic Chips and The sensations Another breakthrough occurred in 2016, when then US President Barack Obama shook Nathan Copeland’s robotic hand. Copeland, who was paralyzed after a car accident, felt Obama’s handshake as if they were touching skin with skin.” This demonstrated a different capability than ICCs. Instead of using electrodes to record the brain and interpret intended movements, they stimulated the brain with small currents to produce sensations,” explains Gallego. In Copeland’s case, an ICC called the Utah Array was implanted in his brain to improve the functioning of a deficient part of his nervous system. The device, made by a rival to Neuralink, was implanted in his sensory cortex and connected to sensors on the tip of his robotic hand. When Copeland shook Obama’s hand, those sensors sent signals causing electrodes in the sensory cortex stimulated the “hand” region of the brain, allowing Copeland to “feel” the president’s hand. These new CBI capabilities represent the next generation of deep brain stimulation, a treatment that involves implanting electrodes into areas of the brain to help people with movement disorders.” These technologies have been around for some time. Deep brain stimulation has been used to help hundreds of thousands of people with Parkinson’s Disease since the 1990s,” explains Gallego. Brain surgery for everyone? For now, BCIs like the Utah Array are only being used in special cases like Copeland’s, and Neuralink’s technology has only been tested on animals. “All clinical applications of ICCs are still in the research phase and have not yet been implemented in clinical practice”, highlights Valle. The Neuralink chip has 96 small flexible probes that must be inserted individually into the brain. And brain surgery is no joke: even if the invasive procedure required to connect an ICC to the brain goes well, the potential for infection or immune “rejection” of the device remains long after implantation. Neuralink plans to use robot surgeon to implant chips in humans Disclosure/Neuralink The birth of neuroethics In the long term, said Valle, ICCs raise “a variety of ethical concerns” that will need to be carefully considered by researchers, companies, funding agencies, regulators and themselves users. Technology is giving rise to a new field of moral inquiry: neuroethics. This is where the discussions become more science fiction. “For example, what are the consequences of privacy violations when the data in question relates to people’s thoughts? How can we ensure that a lack of access does not exacerbate social inequality? What happens when this information can be fed directly into the brain?”, points out Valle. After all, it is the role of science fiction to prepare us for what may come in the future. Warnings about surveillance and technological control were present in early 20th century novels such as Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) and 1984 (George Orwell, 1949). Do we hear them? READ ALSO: Information security has a salary of R$38 thousand; see how to enter the NPC Lives area make tiktokers profit in just a few minutes iPhone 14 has up to R$2,800 off; see prices What it’s like to have a microchip implanted in your hand Company wants to scan the iris of the entire world population to collect data

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