Neuralink Leon Musk's Entire Brain Chip Presentation | Latest technology Big News

Neuralink: Leon Musk's entire brain chip presentation | Latest technology

so what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gentry's head so this neural link (entire brain chip) connects to neurons that are uh in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with this now but that sends out uh neural spikes which are detected here.

Purpose of neuralink (entire brain chip):

Purpose of neuralink( latest technology) like what do we what's our the goal our goal is to solve important spine and brain problems with a seamlessly implanted device.

So you want to have a device that you can basically put in your head and feel and look totally normal but it solves some important problem in your brain or spine so going into the neuralink (entire brain chip)(latest technology) architecture what we've done over the past year is dramatically simplify the device so we about a year ago we had a device which had a multiple parts including a piece that it had to sort of sit behind your ear and it was it was it was complex and you and you wouldn't still look totally normal you'd have a thing behind your ear so we've simplified this to simply something that is about the size of a large coin.

Neuralink Architecture 

and it goes in your skull replaces a piece of skull and the wires then connect within a few centimeters or about an inch away from the device and this is sort of what it looks like.

Neuralink

so this is our little device it does that thing at the bottom is just to hold the threads in place because they're just like little fine wires um I mean frankly to sort of simplifying this uh what we're I mean it's more complicated than this but it's in a lot of ways it's kind of like a fit bit in your skull with tiny wires our current prototype version 0.9 has about a thousand channels uh.

Link vo.9

so that's about 100 times better than next best um consumer device that's available and it's 23 millimeters by 8 millimeters it actually uh fits quite nicely in your skull because your skull is about 10 millimeters thick so it fits it's it goes flush with your skull it's invisible and all you can see afterward is a tiny scar and if it's under your the hair you can't see it at all, in fact, I could have a neural link right now and you wouldn't know all right,

So it's also inductively charged so it's charged in the same way that you told your charge a smartwatch or a phone um

Inductivity charge

 and so you can use it all day uh charge it at night and have full functionality so you would really you know it would be completely seamless uh and uh yeah no wires uh in terms of getting a link.

Getting a Neuralink

So that um you need to have the device uh a great device and you also need to have a great robot that puts in the uh the electrodes and does the surgery so you want the surgery to be as automated uh and as possible and the only way you can achieve the level of precision that's needed is with an advanced robot uh the link procedure the  installation of a link done in under an hour so you can basically go in the morning and leave the hospital in the afternoon and it can be done without general anesthesia.

Surgical Robot:

So this is our surgical robot and we actually ultimately want this robot to do uh essentially the entire surgery uh

Surgical Robot

So in everything from incision uh removing the skull inserting the electrodes placing the device um and then closing things up and having you ready to leave so we want to have a fully automated system

So this shows you um a sort of close-up view which I think is actually not too gruesome of the electrodes being inserted in the brain.

Getting a Neuralink (latest technology)

And if you look closely you'll see that um that's it's a little counterintuitive that if the electrodes are inserted very carefully that there is no bleeding and so the if you have very tiny electrodes and if they're inserted very carefully so the robot actually images the brain and make sure to avoid any veins or arteries so that the electrodes can be inserted with no noticeable damage.

so you will have no noticeable neural damage in inserting the link so does it actually work? I'll quote like the three little pigs demo um and if our uh animal houses we're bringing out the pigs.

Dorothy (Pig)

And what we're going to show you so what we have in pen number one is Joyce, uh and she does not have an implant obviously healthy and happy we're trying to get go through it out and this is how you know it's a live demo so here's Dorothy and in the case of Dorothy used to have an implant and then we removed the implant.

so this is a very important thing to demonstrate is reversibility so if you have a neural link and then you decide you don't want it or you want to get an upgrade and the neural link is removed isn't removed in such a way that you are still healthy and happy afterward and what Dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the neuralink(entire brain chip)remove it

And be healthy happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig thanks Dorothy okay this is a high energy pig um all right So what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neura_link (entire brain chip) in gore's head so this neural link connects to neurons that are in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with a snout but that sends out uh neural spikes that are detected.

Each of the spikes from the 1024 electrodes and  then if you if she yeah she shuffles around touches this knot in the ground or you kind of feed her some food pigs low food um then you can see the neurons will fire much more than when you're not touching this.

Now and uh that's what's making the beeping sound all right cool so as you can see we have a healthy and happy pig initially shy but obviously high energy and uh you know kind of loving life and she's had the implant for two months so this is a healthy and happy pig with an implant that is two months old two months old and working well all right cool um and then um we actually have hope this works is so we said well what if we do two neuro link implants and we've been able to do uh dual neural link implants uh in actually i think three pigs at this point and we have a couple of them.

we're able to show that you can actually have multiple neural links (entire brain chip) implanted um and again healthy and happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig.

Reading Brain Activity:

Reading brain activity

It's possible to have multiple links in your head and have them all be sending out signals and you're working well all right so we just showed you a demonstration of reading brain activity,

And let's see probably see that um as each of those dots represents a neural spike.

When we have um say um one of our pigs on a treadmill and we're going to treadmill. it's the very funny concept really um and we uh take the readings from the neurons and we try to predict the position  of the joints and so we say we have the predicted position of the joints and then we measure the actual position of the joints you can see that they're almost exactly aligned so we're able with a wireless neural  implant to actually predict the position of  all of the limbs in the pig's body with very high accuracy.

Requirements for writing the brain:

The requirement for writing the brain

Now in terms of writing to the brain or stimulating neurons uh we also need precise control of the electric field in space and time we need a wide range of current for different brain regions some  regions require delicate stimulation some require a lot of currents and you want obviously no harm to the brain over time um

Two-photon microscopy:

Two-Photon microscopy

And the way we um, by the way, we analyze the stimulated stimulating neurons uh is with a two-photon uh micro spicy I always have trouble pronouncing that microscopy um and it's very impressive technology you can actually literally see in real-time uh how the neurons are firing so uh the the red sort of things are the neurons red sort of flashing things are the neurons uh firing or I should say the uh the electrodes firing,

So the red things are electrodes firing and then the green is the neuron bodies responding to the current from the electrode.

Towards human clinical studies

So I want to be clear we're working closely with the fad and will be extremely rigorous in fact we will significantly exceed the minimum fad guidelines for uh safety we will make this uh as safe as possible but what are some likely first applications so our first clinical the trial is aimed at people with paraplegia or tetraplegia so the cervical spinal cord the injury we're going to enroll we plan to enroll a small number of patients to make sure the device is safe and that it works, in that case, uh yeah,

So actually just to elaborate on that um if somebody is um like a severe spinal cord injury uh you know to agree that they even they have um very limited control even over their facial muscles I think something that's very exciting as a long-term application is if you can sense what somebody's trying to do with their limbs.

What they want to do with their limbs then you can actually uh do a second implant that's at the base of the spine or wherever just after wherever the spinal injury occurred and you can create a neural shunt so we I think long term I'm confident that long term it will be possible to restore somebody's full-body motion another question from twitter will you be able to save and replay memories in the future uh yes I think in the future you will be able to save and replay memories.

I mean this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode um but uh well I guess they're pretty good predicting um but yeah essentially if you have a whole rain interface everything that's encoded in memory you could upload you could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories then ultimately you could potentially download they into a new body or into a robot body the future is going to be weird uh one common theme that's been coming up a lot on these twitter questions coming in is that of availability.

And so Matthias has a specific question on this which is any an estimate of how much it will cost at launch and what price it will reduce to overtime well I think at launch it's probably going to be it I would say that's not really representative because at first, I think it's going to be you know quite expensive but that price will very rapidly drop and I think over time we want to get the cost.

Obviously down as low as possible but I` think um inclusive of the automated surgery I think we want to get the  price down to a few thousand dollars something like that um and I think that's possible I think it should be possible to get it similar to um Lasik and  then the device electronics itself I think will  not be very expensive because it actually does  use a lot of the parts that are made in extremely high volume in tens of millions of units for smartphones as well as smart watches and wearable are in general.