Is there really anyone who goes through life with Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant in his or her brain? Is that paralyzed patient doing well? And what can he or she do with those electrodes on the thinking mass? No one really knows, the world has to make do with the brief statements that Musk makes on his own social medium X.
The end of January the tech billionaire posted on X that the first patient had received a Neuralink implant and was recovering well. He mentioned “promising detection of nervous activity.” And on February 19, he announced on Spaces, an audio platform from X, that the patient could control a cursor on a computer screen with his thoughts. The implant would have been placed on an area of the brain responsible for movement.
At the presentation of the prototype in 2020, Musk showed the receiver of the implant: the pig Gertrude. But now everything remains mysterious.
Scientists are not very impressed by Musk’s news: as early as 2004, the first patient paralyzed from the neck down controlled a computer mouse. And since then, about fifty paralyzed patients have been equipped with brain-computer connections for scientific research, allowing them to use computers, wheelchairs, robot hands or speech computers control – all in the lab, except for one patient.
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What particularly worries academics is all the secrecy surrounding the research. “We know nothing at all,” says Utrecht brain researcher Nick Ramsey, who in 2016 was the first in the world to equip a severely paralyzed Dutch patient with a brain computer system for home use. Ramsey believes that Musk’s working method is unacceptable: “Worldwide, scientists are obliged to register studies with patients on a website. If something turns out to be wrong in a study, similar trials can be stopped.”
Musk’s tests are not registered anywhere, and he himself does not release any details. “We have no idea if it is safe, what type of patients participate, where the operations take place,” says Ramsey. “We don’t know how it relates to the stuff we use, and to the ethical standards that apply in academia.” Musk had to wait three years for special permission from the American medicines authority FDA to work with unapproved materials.
It also remains a guess whether Musk’s team the specially developed surgical robot used, a white colossus, equipped with five cameras and a very fine needle with which he can insert the 64 electrode wires, each with 16 contact points. “A sewing machine,” says Ramsey. It has definitely been used, he thinks. “There is no other way. A surgeon cannot apply those hair-thin electrode wires himself.”
Musk has big plans for his Neuralink. In addition to allowing paralyzed people to operate their computers and phones, he also hopes to use it to provide treatments for obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia, and ultimately “unlock human potential.” Ramsey has yet to see it. “The question is how long those vulnerable thin electrodes will remain intact in the cerebrospinal fluid.”