Renee Descartes, the famous Renaissance philosopher, wrote, “Je pense, donc je suis,” “I think, therefore I am.” (Yep, he first wrote ‘the cogito’ in French, not Latin.) Our entire reality is in our brain, but we have little idea of how it happens. On August 28 Elon Musk unveiled Neuralink, a brain-machine interface (BMI) and potentially a gateway to understanding reality and soothing suffering.
Media and the public are captivated by futuristic BMI-enabled concepts like Facebook’s dream of rapid typing by thought, or linking humanity’s brains together as a giant supercomputer. Predicting whether and when such breakthroughs may happen is speculative.
What is truly important for a sophisticated BMI like Neuralink is enabling a more profound understanding of how the brain works. More than a billion people suffer from neurological disorders, from Alzheimer’s Disease to learning disabilities. Finding the root causes is an enormous opportunity and challenge.
The Hype Around BMI And Neuralink
Brain-Machine Interfaces are electronics and software connecting a part of your brain to a machine, typically a computer. Many already exist, bypassing our bodies and connecting our minds to the outside environment. Cochlear implants let persons with deafness hear by communicating around damaged portions of the ear to the auditory nerve. Wicab’s BrainPort lets those with blindness see by hijacking pathways used for taste and connecting them to the brain’s vision center. BrainPort users “see” through a camera connected to an array of electrodes on a tongue paddle. Directly-implanted electrodes let those with paralysis move robotic arms.
Not surprisingly, the tantalizing potential to augment our sight, hearing, and strength has the military investing in BMI initiatives like “DARPA and the Brain.”
BMI is a raucous playground for pseudo-science and science fiction. The public’s stratospheric expectations for technology growth make fantastic claims seem plausible. In his August 28 demonstration, Musk said that he expects to eventually save and replay our memories and create positive “interactions of our consciousness with advanced AIs.” That sounds like the plot for the 2000 Schwarzenegger film, The 6th Day. There is a small problem: we don’t know how or where our long-term memories exist.
Others discuss connecting our brains to the internet to access the world’s knowledge with thoughts. And in the Transhumanist Ascension, we will transfer our souls into new machines to live for eternity.
BMI prophecies raise engaging questions. Will it be a crime to think about committing a crime? If virtual worlds can be piped directly into our minds, won’t most people just choose to stay in them instead of experiencing the physical world?
These captivating forecasts and thought problems obscure Neuralink’s real and present value as a powerful lens into our brain’s inner workings.
What Neuralink Is
Let’s cut through the marketing and understand what Neuralink is not. Neuralink is not an AI in your brain. Nor is it a superhighway linking your mind with the internet. What Musk’s team has built is an engineering marvel with massive potential for studying cognitive function.
Neuralink is a high-density probe array that sends and reads signals to and from your neurons. Neurons are the brain’s fundamental building blocks. Their connections and the tiny electrical signals they transmit generate your reality.
Neuralink is a stunning convergence of technologies. A robotic needle one-third of a human hair’s width pierces the cerebral cortex six times per minute to insert probes nearly as thin as spiderweb silk. A vision system guides the needle to miss even the tiniest blood vessels. A chip in a package the size of a fingernail connects to hundreds of probes, each with dozens of sensors, detecting signals a million times smaller than those controlling your smartphone. Software deciphers millions of seemingly random strains of neural chatter to reveal what nearby neurons are doing.
It is not the first high-density brain probe. Its advantages are its mass production design goal and high resolution. Other published “invasive” (inside your skull touching the brain) probes, such as Imec’s Neuropixels, are designed for medical research. In business language, they are not meant to scale.
Low-resolution tools EEG and fMRI have the advantage of being done outside the skull: no surgery is required. However, their images are like those taken from a blimp over a stadium where a crowd of 100,000 is doing “the wave.” Neuralink is akin to seeing when each individual person stands and sits. That resolution is vital to unlocking how the brain works.
What Musk’s Neuralink Demo Showed
The August 28 demo highlighted a major engineering success. Pigs with embedded Neuralink arrays snuffled happily around their pens. Neural signals captured by the Neuralink chip were sent wirelessly to computers in the room and displayed on monitors. When a pig sniffed something, the display crackled. Musk’s team also showed images of neurons “firing” when stimulated by signals from the array. The novel electronics and implant process and were successful. However, the demo did not show any new neuroscience.
The $158 million question (the total investment in the company so far) is what Neuralink can reveal about how connecting and firing neurons translates into cognitive functions like vision.
A Billion Suffer And We Don’t Know Why
Cognitive function disorders, such as learning disabilities, impact a billion people. They ruin lives and strain our social fabric. Autism, chronic pain, specific learning disabilities (Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, ADD, weak visual or auditory memory), depression, anxiety, OCD, Alzheimer’s Disease, bipolar disorder: the list goes on.
Noted neurosurgeon and author, Dr. Henry Marsh, said in a 2019 interview, “Everything we are thinking and doing is generated by the activity in our brain but we really don’t know how. Yes, we understand a certain amount about vision and movement but how consciousness arises, how pain arises, we really have no clue… Thought and feeling are physical phenomena, but we can’t explain it. There’s a huge gap in our knowledge.”
The only way to close that gap and ease the suffering is a more in-depth study of the brain as we reason, learn, sleep, and communicate. For example, we know that humans recognize words in part of the brain called Wernicke’s area. People with poor function or connection in Wernicke’s area struggle to sight-read words. We don’t know how the neurons in that region connect to each other or the rest of the brain. Suppose Neuralink could allow a clear comparison between a typical person and one with a sight-reading disability. In that case, we might determine how to prevent or cure the problem.
Real Potential to Help a Billion People
Every person on the planet stands to benefit from what may be discovered with a powerful new BMI. Easing the limitation and stigmas born by more than a billion people is an audacious goal and a grand global opportunity. And the sci-fi projections for BMI do have a positive effect: they set Everest-like goals. BMI is an unbounded problem. Unbounded problems affecting a billion people are rich opportunities for long-term investment and impact.
Cover Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash