Why Elon Musk Created Neuralink (feat. Real Science)

this episode of real engineering is brought to you by curiosity stream sign up today and get access to my new logistics of d-day series on nebula over the last decade Elon Musk has become one of the most famous men on the planet revolutionizing the banking automotive rocket and energy industries in a relatively short period of time his reputation for disrupting established industries has elevated his status to some sort of tech Jesus for money and with his latest venture neuro-link musk appears to be trying to take that status to the next level near link is to me Musk's most fascinating venture yet with the goal of developing technologies to unearth the mysteries of our most vital organ the brain we've decoded our DNA and even discovered methods to selectively edit it we've invented tiny devices that can be implanted into the body to correct our heartbeat we can take organs from donors and transfer them to those in need we can perform total joint replacements and artificially grow skin from stem cells but the brain remains a mystery in many ways with little to no options for intervention when malfunctions occur we've only scratched the surface of this organs operation and to me it's one of the final great frontiers of science if you pay attention to just the headlines of mainstream science publications this technology will seem like muskers trying to create cyborg humans we're perfectly healthy people will voluntarily get biomedical implants to augment their brain function but that's just musk using his tech Jesus status to generate hype for his latest business venture in reality neural Inc is something much more meaningful but perhaps less exciting for the average person this technology could help accelerate our exploration of the brain and help people with severe brain malfunctions to live happier and longer lives but to understand what neural Inc is trying to do we must first look at technology's neural link is looking to improve on and get a basic understanding of how the nervous system works for that I will pass you over to Stephanie from our new channel real science we have many different kinds of receptors in our body to gather information about the world around us take the hair cells of your inner ear activated when vibrated by sound and the cochlea the snail shaped organ in your inner ear is shaped in a way to allow different portions of it to be activated by different frequencies thanks to the differing stiffness of the basilar membrane along the length of the cochlea this means the base of the cochlea closest to the oval window connected to the outer ear is sensitive to high frequencies up to 20,000 Hertz and as we descend deeper into the snail shaped sensory organ lower frequencies begin to vibrate the hair cells until we reach the apex of the cochlea where frequencies as low as 20 Hertz can be detected when activated these hair cells send electrical impulses through the auditory nerve to your brain for interpretation the exact process of interpretation is insanely complicated and beyond the knowledge of man as there are thousands of neurons involved that gradually branch out as they travel to their final destination but thanks to our understanding of the signal input stage we can actually just bypass the ear as a sensory organ altogether and artificially stimulate the nervous system to allow the Deaf to hear this is exactly what cochlear implants do seeing videos like this is quite possibly the most heartwarming thing on the Internet children who have never heard the sound of their mother's voice suddenly able to hear for the first time their smiles would make anyone see the value in this technology so how does it work the device consists of a microphone and a sound processor which in turn generates electrical signals to send to an electrode array which is actually inserted directly into the cochlea where it can directly stimulate the nurse of the inner ear with electrical impulses this bypasses both the hair cells of the inner ear and the sound transmitting structures of the outer ear and so it can help people who have malfunctions in these parts of the ear an astounding technology but it does not require any implantation of medical devices into the brain as neuro-link plans to do it simply activates the nervous system at its input stage creating a technology which could say activate the auditory cortex directly to allow us to hear is a whole other ballgame current technology on this side of things is highly invasive take the Utah array this implantable device consists of about 256 electrodes which can both read and stimulate neural activity this is exactly the function neural link is working to improve on this lady is doing something amazing this medical implant was placed on the surface of her brain at the motor cortex where it records the activity of the neurons in that area the data from those neurons were then used to effect a mouse cursor which allowed her to type and use a computer despite having no movement in her arms the researchers took this a step further and began using the neural recordings to allow another woman to control the movement of a robotic arm this is the exact technology neural Inc is seeking to improve upon and there is a lot to be improved upon the first issue with the Utah array is the material properties of the electrodes these electrodes are like stiff and sharp needles which allows them to penetrate into the brain and record the internal activity but this causes problems with the body's immune response this is the first part of neuro links plans to improve this technology by making these electrodes much smaller and flexible the Utah arrays electrodes vary from about 0.03 millimeters at their tip to about 0.1 at their base near link threads are much smaller at about zero point zero zero four to zero point zero zero six millimeters side-by-side that looks something like this making the threads thinner allows them to affect a smaller portion of the brain making them less likely to affect nerve function or to puncture blood vessels but perhaps more critically makes the threads more flexible allowing them to move with the brain as it jiggles around in the skull this is actually a huge problem the tissue of the brain is very soft and elastic if you have stiff needle-like electrodes fixed in place the brain will simply deform around them this causes inflammation and scar tissue to form around the needle which over time will block the needles ability to read brain activity through the scar tissue matching the electrodes material properties to the brains as close as possible will allow the electrode to move and deform with the brain and thus decrease the scar tissue formation and extend the life of the electrodes a vital design parameter with medical implants so neural link has moved away from these stiff silicon electrodes and created thinner flexible gold electrodes coated in a conductive biocompatible thin film polymer but electrodes like this come with their own issues their small size and flexibility makes them very difficult for even the skilled hand of a surgeon to insert so neural link has also developed a robotic electrode inserter to lend a helping hand the robot comes with a suite of camera and light modules to allow the robot to accurately insert the threads the robot uses a needle to advance the electrode thread to the desired depth in the brain before retracting and leaving the thread behind this robot on average could insert an electrode thread in a little over a minute even when the surgeon performed manual adjustments to avoid blood vessels near links white paper put particular emphasis on this ability as the breaking of the blood-brain barrier is suspected to be a key driver in the brain inflammatory response which again can cause scarring and reduce the electrodes function it's important to note that neural ink isn't the first company to create thin film polymer electrodes but with this robot and their work on streamlining the manufacturing process for mass production has put near a link in a strong position to create a viable medical device for sale they have also increased the channel count significantly the Utah electrode array can reach a max of 256 channels whereas this prototype system which nearer link surgically implanted any rat and successfully recorded from has 96 electrode threads each containing 32 electrodes for a total of three thousand and seventy two channels to read from this is a very important design parameter as more data equals more control this journal paper titled learning to control a brain machine interface for reaching and grasping by primates details an experiment where researchers implanted a brain machine interface into the brain of macaque monkeys they trained the monkeys to complete a task on a screen using a small handheld controller they recorded the monkeys cortex neural activity during this training and mocked a robot arm too much it's hand movements they confirmed that the more neurons they could record from the higher the probability of the robotic arm matching the monkeys actual arm movements note this footage is from a later 2008 study where the researchers actually trained the monkeys to feed themselves using the robotic arm so if we can record from more channels we can expect to achieve higher accuracy and later as the technology progresses we can perform more complicated tasks perhaps instead of controlling a cursor or a robot arm we can fit exoskeletons to paralyzed patients to allow them to walk however we've one last and significant technological challenge before that can ever be considered we somehow need to get this data out of the brain the electrodes record analog data from the brain which needs to be amplified as the neural signals are very faint with voltages as low as 10 micro volts noise then needs to be filtered out and finally the analog signal is converted to binary data this reduction to simple bits is vital as we somehow need to transfer this data to a computer outside of the head installing a processing board inside the brain is simply not an option looking at the Utah array we can see that there is a lot left to be desired the electrodes themselves require a connector which bears an uncanny resemblance to the head Jack from the matrix when the researchers wanted to use the brain machine interface they had to plug these massive niro port blocks to the connector which fed the data to a huge amplifier and signal processor neural link is trying to fit the amplification and data filtering step inside the onboard processors this is their prototype board which they fitted into the rat here the electrode threads fed into twelve custom-built microchips each capable of processing 256 channels of data equaling the 3072 channels coming from the threads however this prototype system simply used a USBC port for both power and data transfer which again is going to require an ugly port breaking the skin this isn't just a cosmetic issue it's a massive open wound in the body's first line of defense foreign fetch Annagh leads straight to the body's most valuable organ it's simply not an option for a commercial product so neural links next technological challenge is to develop a method to both power and transfer data to these implantable devices elan made some offhanded comments about this during his presentation and then the the interface to the to the to the chip is wireless so you have no wires poking out of your head very very important so you it's it's basically bluetooth to your phone because we'll have to watch the App Store updates for that one make sure we don't have a driver issue updating good one Elon ok so beyond joking about people's brain implants potentially having driver issues this comet in typical Elon fashion is a little misleading Bluetooth doesn't actually have the bandwidth needed to transfer this much data so an alternative method will be needed to transfer it from the device to outside the skin the neuro-link white paper does not shed much light on the specific part of their plants but they did present very briefly in their presentation that their first plant product consists of four of their n1 chips three will be implanted in the motor cortex for control and one will be implanted in the somatosensory cortex for sensor feedback these will feed data to an inductive charging and data transfer coil under the skin behind the ear which will then transfer the data to a wearable computer and charger worn behind the ear this device will probably perform some further data processing before transferring the simplified data through bluetooth to a phone where will allow the user to control a cursor on the phone or a computer near a link stated an ambitious goal of beginning human trials this year in order to begin the long a difficult task of receiving FDA approval if they manage to get the Food and Drug Administration approval for a commercial product this would be a major leap forward for the treatment of injuries resulting in paralysis potentially transforming the life of the hundreds of thousands of people living with paralysis allowing them to complete simple tasks like controlling their computers without the help Beaucaire while I don't see healthy people using these kinds of devices any time soon as implanting any device into the body never mind the brain will always be a massive risk it's certainly a plausible scenario that future humans could elect to have a device like this implanted there is a legitimate worry that machine learning and artificial intelligence is going to pose an existential threat to human society in the near future and you can learn more about it by watching the AI race on curiosity stream curiosity stream has thousands of documentaries from some of the world's best documentary makers and for just $2.99 a month you'll get access to our new streaming service 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Channel: Real Engineering

Views: 1,232,297

Rating: 4.8918891 out of 5

Keywords: engineering, science, technology, education, history, real

Id: Hw67Hus6gIY

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 11 2020