Right now I am in dire need of some miracles. Fortunately, they are not completely out of the world yet – if you look for a while. Last week I stumbled upon the magical way to pull electricity from the sky. This time another miracle: watching the human brain.
Elon Musk has enough money to manufacture his own miracles. About five years ago, the multi-billionaire announced that he wanted to place electrodes in the human brain to read brain activity. With his company neural link you might, someday, upload and download thoughts. And upgrade brains, so as not to perish as humanity in the fight against advancing artificial intelligence.
Compared to Musk’s other projects such as SpaceX (space rocket), Tesla (electric car), and Hyperloop (super-high-speed train), Neuralink most resembled air cycling. Still, that air bike seems to be getting a bit off the ground now.
A new Neuralink milestone is in the works: a vacancy for a clinical testing director. That would indicate, magazine reported Technology Review this week, that Neuralink is getting ready for testing on human subjects. Some caution is in order. The other vacancies show that Neuralink also has two autopsy specialists seeks to analyze brain tissue.
The first human application of Neuralink will be a ‘communication prosthesis‘ that allows patients with severe paralysis to type. The goal is Muskian: to improve the world record brain types. That record is held by Dennis DeGray. This American is paralyzed from the neck down but, thanks to a chip in his head, can run at a speed of 18 words per minute to communicate. This makes him the fastest brain typist in the world.
DeGray is one of the subjects of the BrainGate Project, which has been researching brain machine interfaces (a chip that creates a link between your brain and the computer via sensors).
BrainGate made important breakthroughs last year. For example, they developed a way to read out human brains via a wireless networkso that patients can use brain control more easily at home.
The second advancement is a technique that makes it possible to write without hands. One of the participating subjects, whose hand was paralyzed by spinal cord injury, was able to use the computer to letters ‘thinking’ on a screen.
Also read: Allowing the paralyzed to control their own arms or legs
Until now, brain-computer research has mainly focused on translating brain activity from somewhat grosser motor skills, such as reaching, grasping, Cup of coffee drink with the help of your robotic hand, or move a cursor back and forth. But with letter thinking, subjects can ‘write’ 90 characters per minute. According to the researchers, that speed is comparable to typing on a smartphone by a non-paralysed person.
Such a brain-computer interface can be compared to a microphone in a noisy room: the sensors register peaks in the signal, smart software tries to recognize patterns and suppress the noise (from other neurons). We don’t really understand how thoughts are ‘coded’ in our brains, but we do see intentions. A chip translates this into a movement with as little delay as possible.
In this mind-reading contest, BrainGate is ahead of Neuralink for the time being. Musk’s company reads brains with a chip that receives information from a thousand neurons. By comparison, the human brain has about 86 billion neurons. So there is still a world of wonders to discover.
Marc Hijink writes about technology here. Twitter: @MarcHijinkNRC
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 26, 2022