The world’s richest man is betting heavily on his brain chip, but he has ground to make up.
Elon Musk is no stranger to bold claims – from his plans to colonise Mars to his dreams of building transport links underneath our biggest cities. This week the world’s richest man said his Neuralink division had successfully implanted its first wireless brain chip into a human.
Is he right when he says this technology could – in the long term – save the human race itself?
Sticking electrodes into brain tissue is really nothing new.
In the 1960s and 70s electrical stimulation was used to trigger or suppress aggressive behaviour in cats. By the early 2000s monkeys were being trained to move a cursor around a computer screen using just their thoughts.
„It’s nothing novel, but implantable technology takes a long time to mature, and reach a stage where companies have all the pieces of the puzzle, and can really start to put them together,“ says Anne Vanhoestenberghe, professor of active implantable medical devices, at King’s College London.
Neuralink is one of a growing number of companies and university departments attempting to refine and ultimately commercialise this technology. The focus, at least to start with, is on paralysis and the treatment of complex neurological conditions.
The human brain is home to around 86 billion neurons, nerve cells connected to one another by synapses. Every time we want to move, feel or think, a tiny electrical impulse is generated and sent incredibly quickly from one neuron to another.
Scientists have developed devices which can detect some of those signals – either using a non-invasive cap placed on the head or wires implanted into the brain itself.
The technology – known as a brain-computer interface is where many millions of dollars of research funding appears to be heading at the moment.
Neuralink’s device, about the size of a coin, is inserted in the skull, with microscopic wires which can read neuron activity and beam back a wireless signal to a receiving unit. The company has run trials in pigs and claimed that monkeys can play a basic version of the video game Pong.
It received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for human trials in May 2023.
