in the latest update from Elon musk's brain implant company neuralink we have learned the fate of their very first human patient neuralink has begun the most controversial medical experiment of the 21st century bringing science fiction into a real world that might not be ready for the consequences of a cyborg revolution neuralink has arrived now what comes next on Sunday January 28th 2024 Elon musk's neuralink carried out their first robotic operation on a human brain the patient was implanted with a total of 64 wires directly into the tissue of their cerebral cortex each wire containing 16
microscopic electrode sensors and then a very small battery powered computer device was nestled inside inside this person's skull before the incision was sealed up and the N1 chip was powered on for the first time inside a live human being Elon Musk has confirmed that patient zero survived the procedure in good health and is recovering well Elon also noted that the neuralink device has already begun to show promising neuron Spike detection ever since the concept was introduced 8 years ago nurlink has felt like a purely speculative techn fantasy but in 2024 neuralink is real and it
works he did it he really did it Elon put a fit bit inside someone's skull so now what well Elon Musk promises that the first neuralink product that will be tested is called telepathy and by that he means the first software application that will harness the capability of the N1 device that is currently resting inside the skull of at least one human being I'm not getting getting over that anytime soon nurlink telepathy will enable the user to control a smartphone or computer simply by thinking and by extension the nurlink patient can use telepathy to control
any external device that is connected to their computer or smartphone so in theory telepathy should allow the user to reach out and control pretty much anything it is important to acknowledge right now that neuralink has not just created a superhuman cyborg in fact our patient zero and all of the other initial users of neuralink are people suffering from an extreme physical disability full body paralysis so the purpose of this first clinical trial for neuralink is to help restore some level of autonomy to people who have the least the initial application that neuralink has demonstrated is
telepathic typing and cursor control just by thinking about the movement of the cursor on a computer screen the neuralink will enable a user to write messages open applications browse the web and even play video games this is all stuff that has already been demonstrated in the company's monkey experiments for years now so this is what we can assume the first human neural users are doing right now and as Elon pointed out if you can use a smartphone you can operate any smart device that is linked to that phone so even without having to move or
speak a patient could change their thermostat dim the lights open the blinds activate the Roomba lock their doors all of these Internet of Things enabled devices are now accessible through neuralink telepathy but that's not all that Elon Musk has in mind for neural Link's first human trials Elon also teased that neuralink is working on a second application that will join telepathy this one is called blindsight Elon has been surprisingly optimistic in recent months that even an early version of neuralink could restore eyesight to the blind the idea here is that the N1 implant could be
used to beam digital vision from a camera directly into the brain this one is a little further out but in theory it is possible so with telepathy the nurlink device is being used exclusively as a transmitter the implanted wires are picking up neural activation signals from inside the cerebral cortex and then those signals are converted into computer language by the N1 chip and Broad cast via Bluetooth into a nearby computer or device if this is possible then it would stand to reason that you could flip the process and transmit digital information from a device through
Bluetooth into the N1 implant which would then convert the digital signal into neuron activations to accomplish this the implant would send electrical pulses through the tiny wires into the brain tissue to stimulate the neuron response if those wires were implanted directly into the visual Cort region of the brain the specific patterns of neuron activation should be interpreted by the brain as visual input so even a person who has never seen with their eyes before would be able to visualize the world around them now this won't be anything like having real eyesight but a low resolution
black and white image should be possible as long as we can activate the right neurons in the right patterns imagine something like an old Atari video game from the 1970s where each pixel on the screen is either on or off the graphics were very limited but you could still create a recognizable image and just like video game technology has improved over the decades to become more and more detailed the same thing could be done with this new digital brain Vision only progress will happen much much faster thanks to machine learning hey everyone as we cruise
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10% discount along with free shipping on all hover pens race into a world of luxury and design by clicking the link below I'm also eager to know which addition caught your eye and why share your thoughts in the comments below while neuralink has always been the biggest headline grabbing product in the modern world of brain computer interface elon's company is really just one piece of a much larger puzzle that neuroscientists have been trying to solve for decades how do we understand the human brain the pursuit of decoding the human brain will become a multi-trillion dollar
industry in the decades to come and neuralink will have no shortage of competition but in true Elon Musk fashion his radical pursuit of innovation might stand the best chance of coming out on top synchron is another us-based BCI startup company that has already completed their first round of human trials in 2023 implanting 10 patients with their own neuron sensing electrodes this company is important to watch because it is currently being funded by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates two wealthy and Powerful individuals who do not seem to like Elon Musk very much the method used by
synchron to access the brain is considerably less invasive than the procedure being done at neuralink which is a big factor in allowing human trials at synchron to move at a faster pace instead of approaching the brain through the skull synchron uses a stent-based procedure that they call a Sten Road a stent is basically just a wire that is inserted into a blood vessel which is just a large vein they're like the highways of the circulatory system typically doctors will use a stent to free up a blockage inside the vessel that might cause a heart attack
or stroke in the case of the Sten Road the device is using a primary blood vessel as an express lane directly from the chest into the cerebral cortex once the stod arrives in the brain to an area directly below the motor cortex an expandable mesh is deployed that interfaces with the walls of the vessel and this mesh contains 16 electrode sensors that can begin detecting and transmitting neural activity back down Through the Wire and into a device that is attached to the patient's chest so how does that compare to neuralink well let's go back to
what we were just talking about at the beginning the first neuralink patient has had 64 tiny wires inserted into the surface of their brain by an ultra precise surgical robot and each wire contains 16 electrodes just in the microscopic tip that goes around 2 mm deep into the brain tissue that is a total of 1,24 individual electrodes that are distributed across the circular hole that's been cut into the patient's skull and then looking at our stod again we have 16 electrodes placed inside a blood vessel that is adjacent to the brain material we want to
monitor even with this significant disadvantage on paper in practice the synchron BCI is currently able to achieve the exact same function that neuralink is demonstrating with their current telepathy system basic control over a keyboard mouse and smartphone device and synchron currently has 10 active human patients in their initial feasibility study that began in the summer of 2022 so a pretty significant Head Start in product development but the biggest problem with synchron is that they've already pretty much reached their full potential with the stod system controlling a smartphone telepathically is about all that this particular style
of implant can really accomplish which is still cool but it doesn't exactly provide much of an outlook for the future while if we apply the same logic to neuralink then we can assume that the current telepathy application is is only using something like 164 or less of the total potential that the hardware is capable of which gives neuralink a long-term Outlook that is almost Beyond Comprehension Elon Musk has speculated a lot of potential outcomes like curing brain disease correcting mental illness ending obesity and interfacing the human brain with an artificial super intelligence now there is
obviously no evidence to say that neuralink actually can do any of those things but there's just as little concrete proof to say that it can't all we really know is that we don't know the full potential of the neuralink hardware but we can take a look at another BCI technology that is as close to neuralink as anyone else has come this is Black Rock neurotech it sounds like a scary name and it kind of is Black Rock along with another company called Vanguard are famous for owning the entire world BCI technology is one of the
longest plays that black rock has been involved with conducting their first human trial almost 20 years ago Black Rock neurotech are one of the pioneers of the invasive BCI which is the same category that nuring falls under meaning that the operation has to go in through the skull and gain access to the surface of the brain obviously microscopic electrode wires and high Precision surgical robots didn't really exist 20 years ago so the best option available at the time time was an array of stiff straight electrode pins due to the larger size and rigidity of the
pins in the Black Rock array they can't penetrate as deep into the tissue as a neuralink thread but even still that direct connection through hundreds of electrode pins can provide a significant amount of bandwidth between the brain and the computer even with their relatively primitive approach Black Rock has already demonstrated telepathic control over a computer many years ago they've allowed people to control robotic arms just by thinking they've even allowed a man who lost the use of his legs in a traffic accident to walk again on his own so while their technology approach may be
a bit primitive by Modern Standard the list of accomplishments at Black Rock is extensive something that will take neuralink a very long time to match but it won't take them very much longer to exceed if the Black Rock array can seemingly perform Miracles with hundreds of electrodes penetrating 1 mm deep then what can be accomplished with thousands of electrodes going 2 mm deep so again the long-term perspective is what makes neuralink so captivating there is no other device on the market or even in concept that will provide such a high bandwidth connection between brain and
computer and neuralink is literally just getting started this year is going to reveal some crazy disc discoveries that will redefine what we consider to be possible with the human brain so stay tuned
