Elon musk's neuralink is a brain implant that can turn human beings into cyborgs reverse physical disabilities cure diseases and save the planet from Evil AI super intelligence but how does it work while a lot of science involved is literally brain surgery I promise you that it isn't as difficult to understand as you might think we are about to show you the inner workings of the brain computer interface device known as neuralink okay so the first thing that we have to do is create a physical interface between your brain and the computer that means we need
to access your brain and that means we cut a nice round hole into your skull not too big just about the size of a watch face that's all now this is the outer layer of your brain the cerebral cortex this is where all of your highlevel calculations take place different segments of the cortex control different aspects of your mind and body towards the front front is where your mood and emotions are processed towards the back is where all of your sensory inputs get received like touch and vision right in the middle is the motor cortex
this is The Sweet Spot that neuralink wants to access and it's because this particular section of the brain matter is responsible for turning thought into action the idea here is that we can hardwire the motor cortex directly into a computer now you are controlling that computer entir with your mind instead of a mouse and a keyboard for a person who physically cannot move their hands this is a life-changing enhancement but even for a able-bodied person you would unlock a million times more bandwidth in the connection between your mind and the Machine your thoughts instantly transformed
into digital action in order to access those thoughts though we need to insert a wire into your brain and this is not just any wire neuralink Engineers have developed an ultra flexible metal thread that is thinner than a human hair yet is also able to carry 16 separate electrode connections into the brain tissue each neuralink N1 device has 64 threads that need to be inserted into the cortex and the level of precision required is so high that no human surgeon could perform the operation so instead neuralink uses a robot the function of the R1 robot
is remarkably similar IL to a sewing machine the robotic arm has a tiny Needle on the end that will very quickly stab into the brain material deposit the thread and then retract the R1 has an advanced targeting system that helps it to avoid hitting any veins or blood vessels within the brain the needle and the thread is only piercing the surface level of gray matter what we're targeting with those threads are very specific cells inside the brain matter called neurons there are 86 billion neurons distributed throughout the entire mass of your brain and 16 billion
of them are located in the outer cortex layer and that makes them accessible to a neuralink electrode in the most basic sense neurons are like little switches inside your brain and they allow these electrochemical signals to travel all the way down from the cortex through the intersections of the brain and into the brain stem where those signals get dispatched out through the nervous system to all the different part parts of the body so every action of the human body from blinking your eyes to kicking a ball begins with a particular sequence of neuron activations by
sticking our electrode thread right into the brain material where these neurons live we can start to read the signals being broadcast by the neurons kind of like Eaves dropping on the brain's internal Communications right now we are only looking at them in a binary sense the neuron is either active or not active active one or zero and in this way we can start viewing brain activity the same as computer code in the instant that you perform an action like clenching your fist a group of neurons will switch from inactive to active from zero to one
and as long as that pattern is repeated every time that you perform that action then we can essentially decode the neural signal for clenching a fist so that's great but what do we do with it well imagine you have a spinal cord injury just below your brain stem your neurons can still generate the signal for clenching a fist but the physical connection to the arm has been broken so the message isn't getting delivered but if we can use the threads to read that signal directly from the cortex then we can create an electronic bridge that
bypasses the physical damage and delivers the message into the nervous system or in an even more extreme example you could could send that neural signal out of the body and into something else like a robotic arm that would respond to brain activity in exactly the same way as your biological arm this is all stuff that Elon Musk is talking about right now this is what he expects the technology to accomplish within the next decade but that still doesn't explain how this is going to happen want to know the secret to becoming a successful YouTuber I'm
going to tell you right now it's one very important ingredient caffeine YouTube is a job that never ends and that means I need an endless supply of coffee at home and around the office which is why I love Trade coffee trade is a coffee subscription service that helps you make better coffee at home by delivering freshly roasted beans to your door they do all the hard work for you trade has built relationships with over 55 local Roasters to bring you the best best craft coffee that America has to offer in the comfort of your own
home and you know your beans are going to be fresh because Trade coffee is roasted to order and shipped within 48 Hours of roasting and you don't even need to be a coffee expert to love your Trade coffee trade Maps your specific preferences to hundreds of different coffee flavor profiles personally I've been loving this space cadet blend from Atomic Roasters not only is the name super fitting but I really love the sweet and complex flavor profile of Clementine nougat and burnt sugar trade pairs you with the best coffees using a combination of Art and Science
marrying industry expertise and machine learning so click the link in our description and visit trade.com Tesla space to sign up and save $15 on select plans and get your first bag of coffee free if we've got the physical side of neuralink down with the neurons and the threads then the rest is actually pretty easy let's talk about where those wires lead the N1 brain implant this electronic device is only about the size of a quarter and the thickness of a wristwatch Elon Musk often calls it a Fitbit in your skull and he's pretty much bang
on with that description the electronics are encased in a soft non-reactive silicone jacket and the implant will sit on top of your brain inside the hole that was cut into the skull it's thin enough that the skin can be folded back over the hole and the device will be totally covered no visible sign that you have a brain implant inside the N1 case is a small lithium ion battery cell a wireless charging coil a Bluetooth radio transmitter and a silicon microchip with a very tiny computer printed onto it basically the same stuff you'd find inside
a Fitbit and just like a Fitbit will measure your heart rate and convert that data into computer code the neuralink is measuring your neuron activity and converting it into a digital signal the digital representation of brain activity is then broadcast wirelessly through the Bluetooth signal into a separate processing device like a laptop and that's where neuralink can start to convert the binary code into usable data the best example of this was back in 2020 when nurlink showed us this demo with N1 implanted pigs the purpose of the demonstration was to show neuron activity associated with
the pig's snout so every time the pig touched something with her nose the resulting neural Spike would be picked up by the N1 implant and broadcast wirelessly to a nearby computer which would then convert that activity into both audio and visual representations and this all happened instantly this is a it's a high energy Pig so every blip noise that you hear is a specific neuron firing inside the pig's brain and the different tones signify different neurons activating as the pig Snuffles around in the hay and eats food The Next Step Up from here is to
have the computer convert those bleeps and blips into software commands this is what we're seeing next with the Mind pong monkey demonstration the first thing they do is teach a neuralink implanted monkey to play a simple video game using a joystick so as the monkey is man ulating the controller with his hand the N1 is broadcasting all of the associated neural activity back to the processing computer once they have this data neuralink can use machine learning to identify the specific neuron firings that are associated with the physical movements of the joystick once they have this
code figured out neuralink can bypass the joystick taking neural signals from the N1 to the computer and then converting those into command instructions for the video game and then finally neuralink can remove the joystick entirely because now all the monkey needs to do is think about moving the paddle on the screen to activate the specific neural pathway that the computer will interpret as a command to the video game now all we have to do is take that very simple demonstration and scale up the complexity to the human level there's really not a whole lot of
difference between a monkey moving a pong paddle and a person moving a cursor on a computer screen whether you're using a mouse or a trackpad or one of those spinning ball things your intention to move the cursor begins in your motor cortex as a series of neuron activations so if you had a neuralink in your head that was wired into those specific groups of neurons then instead of that signal having to move from your brain down your spine into your arm into your hand and into the mouse and into the computer you could go direct
from brain signal to computer command this is how we help people who have lost the ability to control their bodies either through a physical injury or a debilitating disease with that direct brain toomp computer interface a paralyzed individual could use a computer just as well as an able-bodied individual and with enough practice a neuralink implanted person would be able to use a computer significantly faster and more efficiently than an able-bodied person with a mouse taking it back to our simple video game demonstration imagine you are playing pong with a joystick and I'm playing pong with
a neuralink now my command intentions can go straight from my brain to the computer via Bluetooth while yours need to travel through your arm and into a controller before the computer even gets the message who would be more likely to win the game and now we are kind of realizing the long-term potential for what neuralink can do in the most simple sense it is going to remove the barriers that separate man from machine don't freak out though not yet at least because in the short term and even in the medium term devices like neuralink are
only going to be used for the medical purposes that we've alluded to restoring functionality to the people who need it the most and this will likely take Decades of work to perfect but eventually somewhere down the road we reach a point where everyone who needs a neuralink has a neuralink and those that do will have technological capabilities that far exceed a non-implanted individual and this is where brain computer interface starts to go mainstream because people who want that enhanced ability will be more than willing to endure a hole in their head to get access to
neuralink now it's the year 2045 and you've got your first cybernetic enhancement your neuralink allows you to interface directly with any bluetooth enabled device just by thinking and if that device happens to support a powerful artificial intelligence software then you've essentially now linked your mind directly to AI creating a whole new layer of processing power on top of your biological Hardware this is the symbiosis that Elon Musk is always talking about it's pretty spooky right but try not to worry about that stuff too much we're still a very long way away from it neuralink is
just beginning the first phase of their initial human studies and all that they're really looking to do right now is verify that the experiments they've already done in monkeys will have the same results in a human then they need to verify that it's safe and effective to have a Fitbit in your skull for years at a time and then we can start thinking about the next step forward so until then you pretty much know everything you need to know about how neuralink works
