Elon musk's neuralink brain implant is pushing the boundaries of what modern Neuroscience can achieve I think that's something we can all agree on but the company might also be pushing the boundaries of what is considered to be safe or even possible when it comes to brain computer interface technology neuralink is in a vulnerable position right now as they begin to face the realities of human experimentation and in the mid of all this a new competitor is rising up a ghost from Elon musk's past has returned to take the throne with a better safer brain implant
this could be a problem let's begin with a story this is Benjamin Rapaport you probably don't recognize him but he was one of the nine founding fathers of neuralink back in the year 2017 Elon Musk says that he interviewed over 1,000 people before deciding on the team of eight doctors scientists and Engineers that would join him in the creation of a new brain implant technology and looking at Ben's resume it's easy to see why he made the cut a master's degree in physics and Mathematics from Harvard a master of science from Oxford a PhD in
engineering from MIT and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School he was working as a resident neurosurgeon in the years before neuralink came to be so so that is all very important to establish that this is not just another tech bro this is a person who brings massive credibility to the table so when we tell you that Benjamin left neuralink in March 2018 just one year after the company was announced to the public we know that this decision carries some weight and the primary reason for Ben's departure is also the key to today's story safety
without getting too deep into the Weeds on how brain computer interfaces work we know that the brain is teeming with electrical activity everything that you do everything you feel everything that you know it all begins with trillions of electrical signals bouncing around through billions of neurons inside of the gray matter of the human brain this has been known for a hundred years hansberger started his experiments with electroencephalography in 1924 but even after a Century of observation the human brain is still mysterious we know that the best Clues to solve our mystery are found closest to
the source inside the human skull we can observe brain activity from the outside by placing electrodes on the scalp but the signals are muffled imagine you're living in an apartment and your next door neighbor is having a party you can try to listen in through the wall and that will provide some information about what's going on you might know what kind of music they're listening to the approximate size of the group if they're laughing or arguing imagine that the people attending the party are neurons in a human brain by observing them through a wall or
a skull you can measure the overall Vibe of the party but you will never know the details of what went on inside but if you were able to walk through the door and enter the room suddenly there would be infinitely more detail to learn about the party you would hear the music clearly you would see the people you would know what they are saying and once inside you could go one step further and walk right up to a neuron and start a conversation from here there's no telling how much you can learn this is all
a metaphor for the invasiveness of BCI but instead of opening a door we have to cut through skin and bone and in order to initiate that personal conversation with a neuron we need to penetrate the brain matter this all comes at a cost we know that Elon Musk is a minimalist when it comes to design F but he's a maximalist when it comes to Performance the fastest cars the most powerful rockets and his approach to neuralink is no different Elon would never be satisfied with just EES dropping on the party he's going straight to interrogating
the neurons as close up as possible the cost of an invasive BCI implant is always going to be damage to the brain there is no way to skirt around the fact that when you penetrate the brain tissue you cause physical damage the first invasive brain implant dates back to the early 2000s the Utah array created by Black Rock Neuroscience it's like a very small bed of nails that would penetrate the outer cortex of the brain with tiny rigid pins the depth of the implant would typically be around 1.5 mm and these implants are known to
cause scar tissue and physical rejection from the brain material so they can't be used as long-term permanent Solutions once the scar tissue forms the ability to have a conversation with the neuron is greatly reduced this is the primary challenge that neuralink was hoping to overcome with their own BCI design one that used ultra thin and Ultra flexible threads to interface with the brain tissue the idea being that these microscopic threads would carry the electrode connections into the brain so gently that the body wouldn't even notice and hence wouldn't try to reject the implant or form
any scar tissue and this Theory could prove to be true but so far it's proven to be ineffective at maintaining a stable connection to the brain neuralink patient zero Nolan arbau experienced the successful implantation of 64 nuring threads these threads carried a total of 1,24 individual electrodes directly into his cerebral cortex and this happened for the first time in late January 2024 by February 85% of those threads had retracted from the brain they fell out and this is a problem that neurolink may have been expecting several Anonymous sources who claimed to work at the company
told Reuters that the thread retraction had been an issue with monkey and pig test subjects for years this is unconfirmed reporting but it wouldn't be surprising given the severity of the retraction issue with Nolan's implant it would be weird for this to have happened for the first time so many years into the testing phase what's even more troubling is that Nolan has said that he was never even informed on the possibility of thread retraction he was completely taken by surprise when the problem occurred neuralink claims to have a solution though and this has been approved
by the FDA but it's not exactly an ideal fix and this relates directly to Benjamin rapaport's concerns with patient safety in this field so the original Utah array with the rigid little pins penetrated 1 and2 mm deep into the brain neuralink took that even further with their flexible threads reaching depths between 3 and 5 mm into Nolan's brain matter but this was clearly not effective so the new plan is to place the threads 8 mm deep into neural Link's second human patient for those with trouble visualizing What A millimeter is 8 mm is just a
bit less than 1/3 of an inch so that's getting pretty deep nerling started off at Double the industry standard and now they're already going to double that again and double the depth means double the potential damage to the brain matter double the potential for negative side effects now this is still not nearly as deep as other current electrode procedures like deep brain stimulation for example but it's still very much unknown what kind of damage 64 insertions each 8 mm deep across a relatively small segment of the brain might do it's also not known if this
change will even solve the problem for nuring if we are still seeing retraction with the threads in the next patient then it's possible that nurlink design as Innovative as it may be just doesn't work this is obviously not the kind of outcome that a business leader like Elon Musk is going to accept but in science there is always the potential of being proven wrong it's the reason that we do experiments in the first place there's a very real potential here that neuralink is just another very good idea in theory that didn't work out in reality
there are no shortage of these failed ideas in history and it's an outcome that we should be prepared for what if you didn't need to penetrate the brain 8 mm or 3 mm or even 1 mm what if you could get all of the information you need just by walking through the door of the party and going no further than that this is the question that Benjamin rapor left neuralink to investigate and he may have already found the answer this is the layer 7 cortical interface it's an ultra thin film array that's only 1/5 the
thickness of a human hair and covered with 1,24 tiny electrode sensors it's designed to sit on top of your brain where it can very effectively e drop on all of the conversations that your neurons are having without ever having to cause any physical damage to your brain matter sounds like a pretty good deal the layer 7even was created by Precision Neuroscience who you probably never heard of but this is the company that was founded by Benjamin Rapaport after he left neuralink and this thin film array is the safer less invasive BCI technology that he had
envisioned back in 2018 one that Elon Musk would have considered to be inferior because it doesn't penetrate deep enough into the neurons but in reality the opposite it has proven to be true while Nur Link's total electrode count in human trials has dropped over time from 1024 down to just 154 Precision has been pushing forward starting with one cortical interface and then adding a second to the same patient for a total of 248 electrodes that was last summer and just recently in April 2024 Precision set a new record with four interfaces in implanted on one
human brain for a total of 4,096 electrodes all reading brain signals at the same time the thin film array is designed to be implanted through a small slit that's cut into the patient's skull then the electrodes are slid in between the brain and its outer protective layer called the dura the thin flexible nature of the array allows it to conform perfectly to the wrinkled shape of the cerebral cortex like Saran Wrap and then a wireless transmitter is placed underneath the user's skin that plugs into the electrodes and broadcasts the neural signal wirelessly through Bluetooth with
such a small thin cut into the skull just 1 mm across there can be multiple arrays placed on different regions of the brain without compromising the patient's skull Integrity you could have multiple neural links but the skull is pretty quickly going to start resembling swiss cheese with all of those holes cut into it Precision has already tested its layer 7 cortical interface with 14 human patients over the past 3 years this is made possible because the thin film array is so easy and harmless to place onto and remove from the brain that the procedure can
be incorporated into any routine neural surgery so what Precision does they find a case where a patient is already undergoing open brain surgery for something like a benign tumor removal or Parkinson's disease treatment that they simply Place their array on the surface of the patient's exposed brain and begin recording data in some of these cases the patient is awake through the entire procedure and will participate in motion capture activities that map physical movement of the hands and fingers to electrical signals in their brain this is a huge advantage to Precision that neuralink cannot match right
now neuralink is only going ahead with their implant in people who already have full body paralysis so that limits their research to imagined movement they can't capture physical movement of their patient at the same time and then when Precision has got their data they simply lift the array off of the patient's brain and their head is sewn back up with no Trace that the BCI was ever there what the company has already been able to prove is that you don't really need to penetrate the brain in order to collect high resolution data from the neurons
you only need to figure out how to bypass the skull just being very close on top of the brain matter is still very good or at least good enough for any practical medical reason maybe nerling still needs to stick people with threads to do elon's whole merge the human brain with AI thing or whatever that's supposed to be but if we just want to help people with disabilities and illness to live better lives then it's already been proven that we do not have to saw holes in their skull or damage their brains to do that
so in many ways what Precision has done here is dramatically lower the barrier to entry for brain computer interface much more so than neuralink ever could and Innovations like this are exactly the kind of development that will make brain computer interface one of the biggest stories of the decade to come
