Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip demo explained

in a lot of ways it's kind of like a fitbit in your skull with tiny wires neuralink wants to connect our brains to computers and now it's showed off a device reading a pig's brain signals in real time but how does it work and will it turn you into a cyborg i'm gonna break it all down for you [Music] elon musk is at it again this time he was unveiling a new brain computer interface it's called the link and he says that one day it could cure everything from paralysis to blindness now i'm going to explain all of this to you using the galaxy brain meme just think starting off basic and then i'm going to blow your mind so step one the basics our brains are made up of billions of neurons cells with long spindly arms that send messages by electrical spikes those spikes and electricity travel between neurons in a chain reaction sending messages to the parts of our brain that control speech or movement for example when you move your arm that action started as an electrical spike up here which leads us to the second part of the galaxy brain meme how neuralink plans to read those electric spikes according to neurolink your brain cells are kind of like electrical wiring and rather than just having neurons sending electrical signals those signals could be sent and received by a chip elon musk unveiled neuralink's implantable brain chip the link version 0.9 it's a brain computer interface designed to be implanted directly into the brain by a surgical robot same day surgery without a big incision or general anesthesia you remove uh about a coin sized piece of skull and uh and then you can just walk around right after right afterwards it's pretty cool the chip plugs into your brain directly by a tiny microscopic threads they're about 1 20th of the width of a human hair and they connect with the neurons in your brain to receive and send electrical signals importantly neuralink says these electrodes won't damage your brain if they're inserted very carefully so the robot actually images the brain and makes sure to avoid any veins or arteries so that the electrodes can be inserted with no noticeable damage you sort of think if you stab something with a wire surely it will bleed but actually at a really small scale it does not now i can't believe i'm giving you specs on a brain chip but here we go it has an all-day battery life wireless charging and it's designed to wirelessly connect to your phone via bluetooth with a range of 5 to 10 meters and the whole thing the chip the surgery the full cyborg experience will start off expensive but musk says it'll hopefully eventually only cost a couple of thousand dollars he wants it to be about as expensive as laser eye surgery okay so you're with me so far i'm going to expand the brain meme we're going to sparkle brain and this is where it gets weird elon musk did a demo and brought out three live pigs one without a brain implant one who'd had a link implanted and then had it removed without any issues and a third pig named gertrude that had had a chip in for two months we got to see a live reading of the neurons in the pig's brain firing in real time specifically the neurons that were sending and receiving messages from her snout um so what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gotri's head so this neural link connects to neurons that are uh in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with a snout but that sends out neural spikes which are detected here we also saw the chip predicting the pig's movements based on brain activity and we saw the electrodes firing and stimulating neurons and lighting up different brain regions and that opens the door to some pretty game-changing applications for the link beyond creating some kind of pork borg neuralink's head neurosurgeon matthew mcdougall said the first trials of the link would be aimed at treating things like paraplegia the company said it received fda breakthrough device designation in july now that's not the same as fda approval but it is a fast track to getting a medical device out in the field but neuralink doesn't want to stop there and that is where we go full galaxy brain there was talk of curing blindness by implanting the link in the visual cortex treating mental health conditions like depression anxiety and addiction connecting the link to a heads up display so you could walk around like the terminator and then there were basic ideas like i don't know telepathy replaying your own memories superhuman vision and the ability to see ultraviolet light oh and connecting your brain and uploading it into a robot and this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode everything that's encoded in memory you could uh you could upload you could basically store your memories um as a backup and restore the memories um then ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body the future's gonna be weird a lot of these ideas are huge but we didn't get any concrete timelines or really any idea of how they'd actually work so while the link could be amazing for treating things like spinal injuries don't expect to turn into the terminator any time soon still it was amazing to see a brain working in real time alright guys if you want to watch the whole presentation and see the little piggies in action then we've got that for you on cnn but if you want to watch the boiled down super cut with just the good stuff we've got that for you too and don't forget subscribe you're definitely going to want to get more neurolink information from us here at cnet if nothing else we will give you a heads up just in case the cyborgs start to take control all right guys thanks stay safe out there

Channel: CNET

Views: 998,107

Keywords: CNET, Technology, News, Tech, science, elon musk, neuralink, live demo, pigs, gertrude, terminator, AI, HUD, man and machine, merge, singularity, neuralink explained, elon musk neuralink explained, what is neuralink, elon musk neuralink, neuralink elon musk, neuralink news, brain machine interface, brain implant, neuralink update, merging man and machine, neuralink presentation, neuralink details, brain chip, neuralink implant, elon musk brain chip, what does neuralink do, brain

Id: KsX-7hS94Yo

Length: 6min 6sec (366 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020