What Really Matters About Neuralink | Answers With Joe

this video is brought to you by audible I went through a couple of years in college where I was I guess the term is undateable I think we all go through periods like that but this one was especially bad for me because there were three different girls that I tried to go out with and they all wound up in the hospital no literally three girls in a row I got the courage to ask him out we went out on one date and then just boom they just vanished off the face of the earth and then I found out later that they were in the hospital do you ever think they just made that up to get out of dating you again well I do now okay to be fair I know that one of them does definitely in a hospital because I went and saw her there several times her name was Melissa and we've been kind of flirting with each other and we went out one time and they she came down with something called guillain-barre syndrome if you don't know what guillain-barre syndrome is join the club I didn't know she didn't know her parents had never heard of it but I know what it is now because I've seen it and it's awful Gyan beret is basically a condition where your immune system attacks your nerve cells which leads all kinds of things like numbness and motor control problems or in Melissa's case total temporary paralysis Melissa was in a coma for two weeks and when she finally came out of that coma she wasn't able to move any part of her body except for her facial muscles and she couldn't even breathe except through a tracheotomy and obviously she couldn't talk but she could communicate and she did it with something called an eye gaze board basically the way it works is the board the clear board and it's got letters with little clumps all around it and she would look at a clump of letters and then you would count off which letter she was trying to get to and then she would blink so she would like look down P Q R st and then she would blink okay so T move on to the next letter G H blink and then you would do the next letter in the next letter and so on and so on and so on until you spelled out a complete sentence and this is a clever solution but obviously it took forever and it was really frustrating for everybody involved the point is the bandwidth for human communication is surprisingly large and it's not something you really appreciate until you don't have it anymore it's for this reason and many many more the Elon Musk helped started a company called neural Inc I've talked about neural link on this channel before it's mostly been speculation because we really didn't know what they were working on but last Wednesday they finally presented to the world what they've been working on which is an implant that's going to give communication access and mobility to thousands of people out there with permanent spinal cord injuries so how did this wonderful idea get received in the press for anybody wondering Melissa did survive her ordeal she actually did spend about three or four months in the hospital before she was finally released but she's fully recovered now she's even running half marathons and that kind of thing but she did not date me again wise choice unfortunately for hundreds of thousands of people out there they aren't so lucky their situations permanent and these are the people that neural link is all about helping by the way this isn't just something that Elon just thought up out of thin air people have been creating different types of brain machine interfaces or BMI since going all the way back to the 1950s we're all pretty familiar at this point with a cochlear implant a device that lets deaf people hear by sending an electrical signal from an earpiece into the cochlea where at these directly into the auditory nerve and our brains picked that up as sound and this is the perfect example of us merging with technology we're literally feeding sensory input into our brains with machines and yes when you say it like that it sounds extreme and weird but it also sounds like this I'm not technically your device [Music] shut up nobody would argue that that's a bad thing giving somebody the ability to hear or see or communicate when they can't right now is obviously a beautiful thing and that's what neuro-link is trying to do but that's not what gets headlines that's not clique were these they're everything you're reading in the news right now makes it sound like we're on our way to a black mayor episode and yes there are some much much bigger implications of this technology that could possibly change the human race as we know it but I'll get to that a little bit later for now let's start with exactly what this thing is and how it works at the cellular level all your thoughts senses and subconscious stuff keeps your body ticking travel along neural pathways from one neuron to another in a series of electrochemical spikes and neurons connect with each other through their various tendrils the axons and dendrites and these connect with each other over tiny little gaps called synapses and they communicate across these gaps by firing ion signals along with tiny amounts of electricity these are called action potentials we've known about this for years and we've had various ways of interacting with the neurons to produce different kinds of results like deep brain stimulation or DBS where they put electrodes deep down into the brain hence the deep brain part and something called the Utah array which is a tiny micro electrode array that can actually record and transmit signals across the surface of the brain but it's small is the little micro electrodes on the Utah array are they're still way too big to actually get down to the neuronal level in order to actually measure and record action potentials from individual neurons you have to get within 16 microns of it and also the Utah array only has up to 256 different electrodes but even with that patients have been able to actually text each other with their minds and control things on a computer just with 256 electrodes so the first thing they had to innovate at neuro-link was a super-thin electrode that they call a thread and this thread is as small as 10 to 40 microns wide and for comparison a human red blood cell is 8 microns wide and this not only gives the ability to interact with individual it also gives the ability to go into the brain without puncturing any blood vessels it's kind of like acupuncture needles if you've ever done that before they're way smaller than hypodermic needles so they can actually just kind of push the skin around itself and go through it without actually causing any bleeding and instead of only two or three hundred electrodes this one has up to a thousand per chip and a possibility of up to ten chips of course the problem with dealing with something so small is that the human hand is way too bulky and inaccurate so then they had to invent a robot that could actually do this with pinpoint accuracy actually it's way smaller than a pinpoint and this robot not only improves the accuracy but it also makes the whole process automated these threads then feed into a processor a tiny little chip that they call the n1 sensor this thing feeds down to an implant behind the ear which contains an inductive coil that allows it to communicate with a wearable device called a link the link contains a battery and Bluetooth connection so if you take off the wearable device then plant shuts down so you can disconnect whenever you want and this also has the added benefit of allowing any firmware upgrades to occur on the wearable device instead of paper to go under the skin and doing it in the implant the whole procedure is done with just a couple of incisions and just a tiny hole in the skull to make it as minimally invasive as possible I mean it's minimally invasive as you can be with brain surgery they want to eventually get it to the point where it's the same as going and getting LASIK done which is why that robot is so important because it just automates the whole thing and just let you bounce right through it and you might be asking if this is just to help quadriplegic then why make it something that's on the same level as getting LASIK done at the mall you know I mean obviously minimally invasive is better for a multitude of reasons but why go through so much effort to make it super simple so that like anybody could get it if it's just for the wait wait wait wait wait hold on I know wait just I'm not there yet wait and they also have an app that connects a smartphone to the link behind the ear so that you can actually train how to move a cursor around on the phone and then eventually that phone will connect to a mouse connect to a computer so that you can you know control a computer with your mind and type just like anybody else could maybe even faster by the way this is something that's already being done by labs around the world including control labs in New York with a wristband that reads the electrical impulse traveling down to the and allows the controller to move a cursor or play a game without actually moving literally with your mind and that's with 16 channels connecting through the skin over one nerve pathway in the arm imagine 10,000 of those actually connected directly into the motor cortex of your brain and something else to keep in mind is that thanks to neuroplasticity our brains would actually adjust and adapt to sort of take in this implant and work with it better over time so we actually don't even know exactly what we're capable of with this thing right now and all this is done with the motor cortex which is a small strip of grey matter across the top in the middle of the brain it might be one implant or multiple implants each with thousands of threads and planted across the cortex both receiving and sending signals now if nothing else this will collect massive amounts of data on brain mapping and neuronal signals that would be orders of magnitude higher than what we have right now it doesn't just stop with communicating through phones and computers wearers of this device could possibly manipulate robot arms and give them the ability to you know move objects around possibly control the movement of a wheelchair with their mind or with some kind of exoskeleton some kind of robotic exoskeleton could allow them to actually walk again and there's also the possibility that the neuroplasticity of our brain working along in tandem with these devices could actually recreate motor function in the body again these are of course a little bit speculative but not outside the range of possibility but clearly Elon has some bigger plans and mind over the long run with neuro link which becomes kind of obvious when you look at the mandatories that he gave them completely wireless other implants like the Utah Ray have wires coming through the scanner just leaves that portion of the brain exposed which not only limits mobility that creates a much higher risk of infection years to decades lifetime obviously this isn't like your phone where you can go get a new one every other year this is something you want to leave in place for the rest of your life if possible practical bandwidth meaning it needs to be robust enough to do the task it's designed to do no more no less and usable at home it's got to be something people can use in their daily lives not just in test beds where they have to come into a lab and get hooked up on a machine in order to use it now all of these mandatories obviously benefit quadriplegics that are going to be testing this device out in the early days for ease of use and all that kind of stuff but it does also set for the next level that Ilan had in mind yes it's happening it's happening the presentation Ilan made the whole brain and a vet argument that people always make the philosophical question you know what if we were just brains and a vet how would we experience the world that way well it turns out we kind of are just brains and vets the bats being our skulls like we don't see with our eyes they just collect light and then transform that into electrical signals that is then interpreted by our brain specifically the visual cortex same thing with our ears with our nose with our skin all of our sensory perceptions are just wired into the brain and that's where we actually experience it encased in this bony enclosure covered in hair today neural links focusing on the motor cortex but in the future they're talking about applying these same technologies to the visual cortex or the auditory cortex so that maybe at that point you can literally just stream audio visual information into your brain maybe eventually you'll have a suite of sensors across your motor and somatosensory cortex allowing you to inter alia immersive worlds you could you could step into a simulated environment and touch and feel and connect and smell a family member or a friend from thousands of miles away our brains are made up of two different layers that evolved over time you got the lower-level limbic system which is kind of our reptilian brain it's more emotional it's more reactive and then you've got the neocortex which is the the more high-level cognitive part of the brain the ultimate promise of neuro link is a third layer to the brain a tertiary digital layer of the brain that allows us to connect with every other human being in the world every other computer in the world and ultimately eventually become part of a global super intelligent AI okay now we're getting in a black bear territory weird yeah but ultimately we may find this level of connectivity necessary you know with upcoming AI neural networks quantum computers the world is changing fast and in the best-case scenario we're gonna get left behind many people are concerned about artificial intelligence and what happens when it gets intelligent that we become irrelevant neural Inc while providing potential mobility and communication breakthroughs for quadriplegics and paralyzed people might just be our best chance to sort of evolve along with this you know to put this technology to use for us instead of getting surpassed by it or destroyed by it and I've talked about this topic enough to know that there's a lot of you out there already in the comments saying no I would never do this not in a million years to which I respond yes yes you probably will don't get me wrong if you don't want one nobody's gonna force you to get one do you boo that's fine but there's a lot of things throughout history that people swore they would never do that we do every day now Facebook already got myspace why would I need Facebook a phone without buttons I would never get that buying things online what do you want your account hacked cable TV what would you even do with more than three channels oh sure okay yeah I'm just gonna wire electricity into my house like that's not crazy with every technology that comes a critical mass where the technology is proven and enough people are using it and benefiting from it that you will start to fall behind if you don't join in yes there are people today who refuse to use smart phones and the internet but let's just be honest they're kind of weirdos at this point and this isn't something it's gonna happen tomorrow it's going to take years maybe even decades to filter down into the general population and by the time it gets there I promise you it's not gonna be considered weird at all in the majority of people right now that are saying they would never consider doing it are gonna consider doing it no no a lot of this video has been very sis-boom-bah and celebratory about knurling because I'm really excited about the potential this has to help people in the near term but in the long term there are some ethical and privacy issues that are definitely going to need to be addressed I also get a little concerned about class stratification on this if only wealthy people can afford it they'll have basically superpowers that would put them far and above people and lower classes of course smartphones have become inexpensive enough that pretty much everybody can afford it and that's the general trend that has seems to happen in technology so I guess you know we'll see one last thing I want to do is shout out the team at neural Inc you know Elon Musk gets all the headlines and it's all kind of may not like this is his thing that he's doing but there's actually a huge team of people very talented very intelligent people who are working this and to eelain's credit he actually stood to the side and let them do most of the presentation so I want to give them a shout out and these people include max Hodak the president of neural Inc dr. matthew MacDougall the head neurosurgeon vanessa Tolosa of neural interfaces DJ so director of implant systems and Philips say best the senior scientist in Elan did say that the main point of that entire presentation was recruitment so if it's something that you're interested in they're looking for people in a whole vast array of different fields to be multidisciplinary about this so check that out if you're smart enix Mart face they're hoping to start human trials by the end of next year and Elan did let slip that they have had to do some testing on monkeys and that there is actually a monkey out there that is controlling a computer with its brain using neural ink right now so there's that obviously I'm leaving out a ton of information about this that was in that presentation I'm gonna link to it down in the description below you can go check it out take a super deep dive on all these different elements of this program it's pretty neat stuff but this is a real thing it's really happening and it's equal parts amazing and terrifying welcome to 2019 by the way it the idea of people getting into your brain using an implant is just super weird to you you should probably know that we already have other people in our brains sort of that's actually the central idea of a great book that I enjoyed a while back called who's in charge free will in the science of the brain which you can check out on audible this book is written by a neurosurgeon Michael Gazzaniga and it presented a new look at the brain that kind of just totally changed my idea of consciousness and thinking itself it goes to the history of split brain experiments and it shows how there's different modules in the brain that kind of interact with each other in various ways and the happy little accidents that sort of created our current understanding of the brain structure and it dips into fMRI experiments that peel back the curtain and allowed us to really get an understanding of what's going on behind the scenes and what we found out is that milliseconds before we make a decision there's actually a subconscious part of the brain that makes the decision first and then that gets filtered through an interpreter module in the brain that then sort of justifies that decision so in other words we think we're making a logical conscious decision about things but what we're really doing is just justifying a decision that something else in our brain already made seriously that's just one of the mind-blowing things that I read in this book I recommend it to absolutely everybody and you can listen to it and a special prime day price if you go to audible.com slash Joe Scott or text Joe Scott to 500 500 right now audible is offering a special deal for Prime members if you start an audible membership you can get 66% off your first three months in other words you will get three months for the price of one and that price is only 495 it's crazy audible members also get a credit every month for a new audiobook in their store and access to two audible originals and if you don't use them from one month they roll over into the next one so you never miss out the offer is good for the month of July so definitely take advantage of it while you can it's audible.com slash Joe Scott or text Joe Scott - 500 500 to get started thanks to audible for supporting this video and a huge shout out to my patreon supporters my answer files who are joining a great community doing great things and supporting me and making me happy that matters there's some new people that have joined I got a murder the names real quick we've got His Majesty the King Mario Louganis Cooper Jenson Lonnie Morrison Denise tateo Troy West Matthew J birch Rena and Silas Barrios Korey Allison Herbert dour H Stiles Allen Barnes Matthias r Mattias Schenker Nuno bran dice Amy Lauren Gallatin re and this is an actual name Joe Scott is an undercover time-traveling ninja turtle there you got me to say it thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get early access to videos behind the scenes stuff and just join a really great community you can go to patreon.com/scishow joe please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video Google thinks you'll like that one or any of the others with my face on them and if you do like those I invite you to subscribe I come back with videos on cool fun sciency topics every Monday and Thursday all right thank you guys for watching now go out there have an eye-opening week and I'll see you on Monday hope you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 766,059

Keywords: answers with joe, elon musk, neuralink, brain implant, N1 sensor, brain machine interface, cochlear implant, urah array, neurons, synapse, brain science, action potentials, brain mapping, motor cortex

Id: W_diJS6ILIA

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/valdanylchuk]

Nice summary. Addresses the emotional reaction to the idea, and provides just enough technical details and expectations to understand what's coming.

My favorite moment (2:13 - 2:32): "Last Wednesday they finally presented [...] an implant which is going to give communications access and mobility to thousands of people out there with permanent spinal cord injuries. So how did this wonderful idea get received in the press?.." Observes the headlines... Face-table.

[u/Pocket_Dons]

Combined with starlink for low latency global brain communication

Edit: Btw I truly think this is Elon’s main purpose for Starlink

[u/electric_bro]

Been a subscriber of Joe for 2 years now. His videos are really cool.

[u/DontBendItThatWay]

His channel is great. Always interesting topics.

[u/Anle-]

I suggest his video about anti-aging too, it's really good

[u/JesseRodOfficial]

Found his channel just yesterday, I really like the near perfect combination of professionalism and joking around.

[u/Waterskipper7777]

https://youtu.be/hG4ph-ZBcdY

Another nice video about the N1 product by NEURALINK

[u/lokujj]

Utah array might have less than 300 electrodes but typically you expect to record multiple neurons per electrode. It's great that you get 1000 channels per chip for the Neuralink system, but don't the smaller electrodes imply fewer neurons per channel? Will you really be getting 3x the number of unique neuron signals?

[u/divxr]

Great info, thanks