Neuralink: Merging Man and Machine

you know monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain just yeah so your brain is composed of neurons neurons connect together and form a network that can talk to each other through synapses they're the connection points between neurons and they communicate using chemical signals known as neurotransmitters all of your senses everything you experience in life it's all just neurons firing electrical signals or otherwise known as action potentials when neuron spikes occur these neurotransmitters are released information is then relayed across its synapses and eventually reaches another neuron now multiply this process by a hundred billion and that's your brain in a nutshell electrodes are the way that neural link and other medical practices study your brain activity by placing these electrodes close to neurons the action potentials that create electric fields inside your brain can be detected and transferred to a machine that records and measures the data near link plans to use this to its advantage your brain has two main systems your limbic system in your cortex these two are in a relationship with each other your limbic system is responsible for your basic emotions mere survival instinct your cortex is responsible for your problem-solving skills your critical thinking it's where your consciousness exists near link is aiming to create a third layer to this the implants will be a third wheel in this relationship but would increase our capabilities by multiple orders of magnitude they plan to increase the number of neurons that you can access regularly then you can use to remember things or regain access to certain parts of your brain that may no longer be active this is extremely useful for medical patients some of which we had absolutely zero options of mattel neural link became a reality the goal is to make this one of the most simple procedures there is similar to people getting LASIK to improve their vision but why we even need this in the first place well in most cases it's a bandwidth issue now many people hear this but don't exactly understand what that means it's a speed problem it's an energy problem it's how fast you can get information into or out of your brain if you have something that you want to write down on a computer you have to type it with your hands or speak it into a microphone that's probably going to mess it up if you want to learn something it could take days weeks months or even years to fully grasp if we were able to solve this bandwidth issue we could accomplish exponentially more in time with much less physical effort nearly it cuts out the middleman and allows input and output directly from your brain to whatever you're doing on a machine or vice versa it's like going from writing using a quill it's having a pencil it's having a keyboard to having Siri so now potentially having nothing but the power of your own brain this is where brain machine interfaces come in and they change everything a brain machine interface or BMI is composed of two things a brain and a machine the machine can be anything a phone a computer a bionic arm anything that provides you with sensory inputs from the outside world or an external source these inputs are then returned back into your brain where you can process them but you need something artificial in your head to return this data to now don't worry it's not like putting a CPU inside your head it's actually quite tiny each neural link and one chip is roughly four by four millimeters with a thousand electrodes each it's feasible to fit up to ten of these inside your head in different areas all to measure and affect different parts of your brain but companies and neurosurgeons alike can't just go around throwing anything they want into someone's head it's usually a lengthy process to getting these things approved by the FDA for medical purposes and later on public use BM eyes contain the potential to help people with a wide range of clinical disorders using just 256 electrodes or about two-and-a-half percent the number of electrodes neuro-link eventually plans to use human patients have been able to control computer cursors robotic limbs and speech synthesizers the full potential with nearly 40 times that amount of electrodes is hard to imagine currently the best fda-approved vmi is used for Parkinson's patients and it only has ten electrodes for neuro-link this is just the beginning and it's already a thousand times better than what is currently approved in version one each electrode is inserted into your head via tiny threads that are roughly 5 micrometer stick they're around 10 times smaller than a human hair and contained 32 electrodes each it's roughly the same size as a neuron which is a good idea there's a size limit for things that you want to stick in your head something too large is inevitably going to cause problems so the smaller the better near link actually made a robot that is used to insert these with extreme precision which is pretty much mandatory humans couldn't do it if they wanted this is a penny it's pretty small right it's roughly the same size as the tip of my thumb now zooming in extremely close this right here is the needle that will be inserted into your skull placing it beside a penny you actually couldn't see it as the robot inserts each thread one by one at the end there could eventually be up to 10,000 of these electrodes inside your head each responsible for recording separate neurons which can later on be analyzed but not only can they read data from your brain they can also input data as well it's a two-way street it's sort of like being able to upload and download things from your brain brain implants aren't exactly new either though they go as far back as the 1950s hearing implants are a good example near link just plans to take the baton and continue down the path but in a different way other BMIs approach the situation differently for deep brain stimulation the kind of implants that were used to assist Parkinson's patients that I mentioned before they essentially used larger stiff needles that were pretty much just shoved into the brain to affect neural activity just as the electrodes from neural link will it works well but there's a pretty high probability that complications will occur over time seizures strokes and even more it may fix one issue but is probable that multiple other issues will show up so your brain doesn't sit still inside your head it moves around with you even if you think you're sitting still your brain moves with each breath each heartbeat this is what can cause issues and is why a robot is needed for neuro Linx procedure to be successful neural link is taking a different approach and it really isn't even a huge surgery your head isn't going to be completely peeled open for these chips to be inserted each chip will be inserted into your head through a small incision of eight millimeters at most so less than a centimeter you won't need stitches you won't need any of that it's hardly a surgery at all by the way those chips that are inserted are completely wireless as you would probably hope the craziest thing of all is that you won't need to go to a hospital or random place to hook yourself up to use this interface there's no USB port sticking out of your head you will need a caretaker or anyone to help you with the use of a single wireless battery-powered computer behind your ear it will actually be able to connect you to your smartphone effectively making your phone and official part of you the options and potentials for this technology is limitless and is only going to improve over time now I don't want to over reach here and throw out ideas that are impossible so I won't but I will give some solid uses and some pretty cool ideas for near link that can actually become a reality one day this is my computer ironside sent it to me a couple months back and is great for everything I need to do it has a twenty atti graphics card an i-9 processor and 64 gigabytes of RAM I can edit much faster and more efficiently than I was able to before I can play pretty much any game on Ultra settings but in order to do these things I need to use my hands no duh I need to use a mouse and a keyboard to get things done in the way I want or to move my character in games but in your link may be able to change this if a patient is able to control an arm with his or her mind then it's not unfeasible to believe that one day you may be able to control characters and video games with your brain as well considering it's all Bluetooth all wireless it's not too much of a stretch to ask this coupled with advancements in virtual reality will cause video games and potentially even films to become almost fully immersive let's take an example of where neuro-link technology could be used in a pretty cool yet practical way let's say you're about to take a month-long trip to Tokyo you're an American and as most Americans most of us only speak one language we'll have no clue how to get around any city that doesn't have street signs or directions completely in English but luckily near link can help us out here imagine there's a Tokyo local who's lived there his entire life looking at the action potentials of that particular person studying their neuron spikes in a region of their brain called the hippocampus and in which order they occur you can trace out a path throughout the entire city from when these neurons spike and once this data is input into your brain you'll be able to traverse the city like you've lived there your entire life telepathy is no longer unrealistic the electrode implants that detect neural signals wirelessly transmit their data back to the small computer behind your ear so the idea of transferring data back and forth between these devices is relatively simple to imagine and because the electrodes can both read and write data you could theoretically communicate back and forth between people who also have near link implants now at the moment this technology isn't exactly close to making this happen maybe a word or two but in theory and with enough improvements it is possible for high bandwidth communication between two people using nothing but their minds it may be an aggressive approach as Elon tends to take but you can see neural link implants in human patients by the end of this year and once that happens it's only up from there improvements will slowly be added and I can honestly see this becoming a big and common practice within the next couple of decades you always hear that there's new technology coming out that will change our lives but I'm serious when they say this if this is taken seriously and can work in the ways we're studying and planning on at the moment I see this as an invention that is on the scale of the Internet it will change the world the way airplanes impacted travel the way antibiotics impacted medicine computers and the internet threw us into a brand new digital age phones and computers have become extensions of human beings they can answer almost any question you could ask at a moment's notice they've both been pivotal in connecting the entire planet via Minds like the one near link are creating are going to have a similar and honestly even larger effect than that as time goes on as we enter our new decade technology that we've passed off as unrealistic becomes more and more plausible things that we've written off as impossible end up being the same things that push society forward airplanes Rockets medicine all things that used to be seen as wizardry or some voodoo magic are now things that we use every single day as neuro-link progresses and gets better and better as cultural impact will grow larger and larger kids being born today will grow up in a world vastly different than the one we're living in today the same way that we're living through a time vastly different than the previous generations we will make mistakes along the way the past shows that pretty well however humans overcome we adapt and we move forward if you think we're living in the peak of the digital age you have no idea what's just around the corner [Music] this video was sponsored by the great courses plus whether you want to understand the biology of your own body or learn how to program the great courses plus has something for everyone for this video I actually went through the course on the brain to gain a solid grasp on how humans learn and memory functions and actually ended up forming the groundwork of this video the great courses plus is an on-demand video learning service that brings you the highest quality content from some of the smartest people on the planet they're the best place to go to learn about pretty much anything one they offer insight to topics in extreme detail that you won't find anywhere on YouTube if you enjoyed this video I highly recommend you to check out any of their courses 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Channel: Aperture

Views: 759,884

Keywords: aperture, Neuralink: Merging Man and Machine, Neuralink Explained, neuralink, yt:cc=on, elon musk, elon musk neuralink, what is neuralink, neuralink presentation, what does neuralink do, merging man and machine, brain machine interface, artificial intelligence, neuralink news, neuralink update, aperture artificial intelligence, mankind's last invention

Id: 0jOjh6lwp9w

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020