Will Brain Chips Become Next Big Thing in Future?

Image Source: ABC News

Neuralink, Elon Musk's start-up that is developing implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers have released a video that shows a monkey playing a video game using only its mind. 

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup released footage on Friday appearing to show a monkey playing a simple videogame after getting implants of the new technology.

The 3-minute video by Neuralink here shows Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on each side of its brain, playing ‘Mind Pong’. Although he was trained to move a joystick, it is now unplugged. He controls the paddle simply by thinking about moving his hand up or down.

The video shows Pager initially using the joystick to move a colored square in the video game. Neuralink was able to use machine learning to anticipate where the monkey would move the square and predict its hand movements.

Eventually, the joystick was disconnected from the computer, but the monkey appears to continue playing Pong using only his mind.

“Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again. The device is implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look & feel normal.”

Neuralink works by recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain using more than 2,000 electrodes implanted in regions of the monkey’s motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements, the video’s voiceover said.

“Using these data, we calibrate the decoder by mathematically modeling the relationship between patterns of neural activity and the different joystick movements they produce.”

Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer chips to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and spinal cord injuries and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.

Image Source: Science Alert

In August 2020, Musk unveiled a pig with a Neuralink chip implant, describing it as “a Fitbit in your skull.”

Musk has a history of bringing together diverse experts to develop technology previously limited to academic labs, including for rockets and electrical vehicles, through companies such as Tesla Inc and SpaceX.

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX revealed Neuralink in 2017, promoting it as the human answer to artificial intelligence, which he believes will make “house cats” of humans once algorithms become smarter than humans.

But the first goal for the technology, he said at the time, was to assist people with neurological conditions that prevent them from controlling hand and arm movements. Future Will Be Controlled By “Combined Will Of The People Of Earth”

The Neuralink technology will be in the form of an injectable “neural lace” comprising of a network of electrodes. This will augment the human brain by adding another layer to the limbic system and the cortex. This layer will possess the capability to effectively integrate and thus communicate with a computer.

Written by - Violet Priscilla S

Edited By - Anamika Malik