Editor: Editorial Department.
Just now, Musk announced that the first human patient implanted with neuralink can already move a computer mouse by thinking!
Progression is good, the patient appears to have been completely**, with no ill effects known to us. Patients can move the mouse around the screen with just their brain. 」
Previously published demo.
The news was so explosive. From today, mankind has officially entered the era of neuralink brain-computer interface!
How many years is humanity away from such a world?
Netizens shouted: We seem to be living in a science fiction movie, living in Musk's time, how lucky! 」
He has made history. 」
In comparison, the Vision Pro is weak. 」
The world's first human to access the neuralink brain-computer interface
This news was revealed by Musk at the spaces event of the social ** platform X.
At last night's event, Musk was asked about the progress of Neuralink's first human patient. His answer made the scene exclaim
In January of this year, Neuralink implanted a brain-on-chip into the first human patient.
Previously, Musk announced on X that the first neuralink implantation operation in humans has been completed and the patient is recovering well. Initial results from neuronal pulse monitoring suggest that Neuralink's technology will be very promising.
After a month, the patient was fully ** and exhibiting the neurological effects expected by Neuralink.
The next challenge is to get the patient to move the mouse in all directions, holding down the buttons.
Musk said that the progress they are looking forward to right now is to get patients to press as many buttons as possible by thinking.
Of course, the purpose of neuralink is to ** disease, and it is not for ordinary people first.
Musk said in January that the first people to be implanted with the Neuralink chip were people who had lost the ability to use their limbs, so that they could control their phones or computers with their minds alone.
Neuralink's goal is for Hawking to communicate faster than a fast typist.
Musk has been waiting for the day when Neuralink will be implanted in the human body for too long.
Back in 2016, Musk founded Neuralink. However, it was not until May 2023 that it was officially qualified for human trials.
Previously, the FDA had repeatedly rejected human trials of Neuralink due to concerns that the chip could overheat and cause damage to the human brain.
Previously, brain-computer interfaces were only implanted in monkeys, pigs and other animals, but now, they have finally received the human brain.
Is a super human who can talk to AI really coming?
There are already paralyzed people, relying on brain-computer interfaces**
Of course, in addition to controlling electronic devices with opinions, Neuralink also has a great goal, which is to ** diseases, such as paralyzed people, ALS patients, or Parkinson's patients.
This technology has been proven to be feasible.
Twelve years ago, the man, Gert-Jan Oksam, was involved in a car accident and was unable to move his legs due to a spinal cord injury.
Today, he can walk 100 meters on his own.
That's because, with some implants in his back and brain, he restored the connection between his legs and his brain, allowing his spinal cord to function.
According to researchers at Neurostore in Switzerland, this system creates a digital bridge between the patient's brain and spine.
Surgically implanted electrodes, placed inside Oksam's skull, were able to send his thoughts into the antenna headphones he was wearing. These thoughts are then processed in his backpack and transformed into commands.
Eventually, his intentions were translated into movement, which became spinal stimulation.
Of course, it does not mean that once the chip is implanted, the system can immediately restore the movement of people.
In addition to brain surgery, it takes a lot of time to train to calibrate this brain-computer interface system to fit a person's unique thought process.
The study has been published in nature.
*Address: At present, there are only a few dozen people in the world who have implanted brain-computer interfaces.
The first to be at the forefront of this field was the startup Synchron. Now, Neuralink has also officially implanted the chip into the human body.
Everyone has been crazy about opening the book, and the next breakthrough in the field of brain-computer interface may be on the horizon soon!
For example, in November last year, Musk revealed that Neuralink is building a vision chip that is expected to be completed in a few years.
"In the future, we hope to restore abilities such as vision, motor function and speech, and ultimately expand the way humans experience the world," Neuralink said.
Humans are too slow than AI, and Musk wants to transform Humans 20」
In fact, to put it mildly, healing is just a grasp that Musk has found, and it is the best wording for a commercial company to the outside world.
His truly great vision is that of humanity 20。
In his opinion, human beings are far less intelligent than he thinks. The output of an AI may be in the gigabyte range, but the speed of human output is only 10 bytes. If this continues, humans will not be able to communicate with AI at all.
Therefore, his goal is to transform humans, upgrade humans, and create super humans who can talk to AI, that is, Human 2Version 0.
When AI communicates with people, it will communicate with us and trees. 」
According to Musk's long article from a reporter, Musk and the Neuralink team have been working overtime recently to promote the implementation of the plan.
Musk feels that before the emergence of artificial intelligence that surpasses humans in ability, human beings must be able to obtain more powerful intelligence through brain-computer interfaces, so that humans can live in peace with artificial intelligence.
While the ideal of increasing the bandwidth of people and AI by several orders of magnitude is abundant. However, Neuralink's real-world funding situation is not going well - most of the current investment comes from Musk himself.
How do you understand the great goal of neuralink? All the staff was in deep thought.
A year later, Musk saw the miracle - the ** of two pigs moving their legs under the stimulation of electrical signals, and he was so excited that he discussed the possibility of other miracles at the meeting.
If people in wheelchairs can walk again, blind people can see again, and deaf people can hear again, the world will immediately understand how great Neuralink is.
And now, Neuralink has finally taken the first step.
Once implanted, these coin-sized brain-computer interfaces will be connected to the human brain through wires that are only 1 40 hairs thick.
The patient can pick up ** through the mind.
During the implantation process, the patient will make a hole the size of a coin, so that the robot will connect the connection wire, which is only 1 40 hairs thick, to the planned position of the brain.
A specially developed needle system ensures a lossless connection between the wire and the brain.
It is estimated that the cost of each implant surgery is about $10,500, including inspections, parts, and labor, and about $40,000 will be charged to the insurance company.
Neuralink said 11 surgeries are planned for 2024, 27 in 2025 and 79 in 2026.
Then, according to the documents provided to investors, the number of surgeries will increase from 499 in 2027 to 22,204 in 2030.
Neuralink**, if the plan goes well, the company will have annual revenues of up to $100 million over five years.
Brain-computer interface reveals brain secrets
On the front page of Nature today, an article has been updated about BCI devices that are revealing the secrets of the brain.
Moving prosthetic limbs, manipulating virtual characters to speak, typing quickly – these seemingly incredible skills are now being learned by paralyzed patients through the amazing technology of BCI.
These patients can perform many complex operations just by thinking about it in their brains.
They capture neural activity through electrodes implanted in the brain and convert it into executable commands.
While BCI was developed to help paralyzed patients recover, it also provides scientists with a unique perspective – exploring the mysteries of the human brain at unprecedented resolution.
Using brain-computer connectivity, scientists have gained a new understanding of the basics of the brain.
This challenges our conventional wisdom about the structure of the brain and discovers that the boundaries and functions of brain regions are more blurred than previously thought.
In addition, these studies have helped researchers figure out how brain-computer interfaces themselves affect the brain and find ways to improve these devices.
Frank Willett, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, said that with BCI in humans, we have the opportunity to record the activity of individual neurons in many brain regions, which has never been achieved before.
Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, noted that the devices are capable of continuous recording for months or even years, allowing researchers to delve into the learning process, brain plasticity, and complex tasks that require long learning periods.
About 100 years ago, the idea that the electrical activity of the human brain could be recorded was first supported.
Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist, attached electrodes to the scalp of a 17-year-old boy who happened to have a hole in his skull as a result of brain tumor surgery.
He observed the phenomenon of brain oscillations for the first time and called this measurement electroencephalogram (EEG).
Researchers soon realized that recording from inside the brain might be more valuable.
Berger and others surgically placed electrodes on the surface of the cerebral cortex to study the brain and diagnose epilepsy.
Today, implanted electrodes for recording are still the standard method for determining the starting point of a seizure, so that the condition can be surgically addressed.
By the 1970s, researchers began using signals recorded from deep within an animal's brain to control external devices, marking the birth of the first implantable brain-computer interface.
In 2004, Matt Nagle became the first person to receive a long-term invasive BCI system after being paralyzed by a spinal cord injury.
This system records the activity of individual neurons in his main motor cortex through multiple electrodes, allowing him to control the opening and closing of his prosthetic hand, as well as perform some basic robotic arm tasks.
In addition, the researchers used EEG readings – collected by non-invasive electrodes placed on the human scalp – to provide a signal for BCI.
This allows paralyzed patients to control wheelchairs, robotic arms, and gaming devices, although these signals are weaker and the data is less reliable than invasive devices.
To date, about 50 people have implanted BCI, and advances in artificial intelligence, decoding tools, and hardware have fueled rapid growth in this field.
For example, the technology of electrode arrays has become more advanced.
A technique called Neuropixels has not yet been applied to BCI, but it is already being used in basic research.
The array of electrodes made of silicon, each thinner than a human hair, has nearly 1,000 sensors capable of detecting the electrical signals of individual neurons.
Researchers began using neuropixels arrays in animals seven years ago, and two papers published in the last three months have shown their application in answering human-only questions, such as how the brain produces and perceives vowels in speech.
In addition, BCI's commercial applications are also accelerating.
For example, the aforementioned Neuralink implanted BCI in humans for the first time in January this year. Like other BCIs, this implant is capable of recording the activity of individual neurons, but differs in its ability to connect wirelessly to a computer.
Although the main driver of BCI is clinical benefit, in the process, they also reveal some unexpected discoveries about brain function.
Textbooks often portray brain regions as having well-defined boundaries or separations.
However, records of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) reveal that this is not always the case.
Last year, Willett and his team used BCI implants to perform speech generation for a person with motor neuron disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
They hope to find that neurons in the motor control area, known as the anterior gyrus, are grouped according to the different facial muscles they control, such as the chin, larynx, lips, or tongue.
In reality, however, neurons with different targets are mixed together. According to Willett, this anatomy is very complex.
They also unexpectedly discovered that Broca's area — a brain region thought to play an important role in language production and pronunciation — contains little information about words, facial movements, or sound units called phonemes.
Willett says it was surprising to find that it doesn't actually directly participate in language production. Previous studies using other methods have hinted at a more nuanced picture.
In a 2020 study on movement, Willett and colleagues recorded signals in 2 patients with varying degrees of motor limitation, which were concentrated in an area of the anterior motor cortex responsible for hand movements.
Through BCI, they found that this region actually contains the neural coding that controls all limbs, not just the hands, contrary to previous assumptions.
This discovery challenges the nearly 90-year-old belief in medical education that parts of the body in the cerebral cortex are presented in the form of topological maps.
This phenomenon can only be observed in rare cases where it is possible to record the activity of individual neurons in humans, Willett said.
The team of Nick Ramsey, a cognitive neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, made similar observations when implanting BCI in the motor cortex that corresponds to hand movement.
One side of the brain usually controls movement on the other side of the body. However, when the participant tried to move his right hand, the electrodes implanted in the left hemisphere of the brain captured the signals of both the right hand and the left hand, which was a very surprising finding!
Movement relies on a high degree of coordination, and the brain must synchronize the activity of the entire body. For example, stretching out an arm can affect balance, and the brain needs to adjust parts of the body to accommodate this change, which may be the reason for the distraction.
Ramsey explains that this type of research shows great potential that we didn't think of before.
For some scientists, these blurred anatomical boundaries are not surprising.
Our understanding of the brain is based on average measurements, which depict the general layout of this complex organ, says Luca Toin, an information engineer at the University of Padua in Italy. Differences between individuals are inevitable.
Juan Álvaro Gallego, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, said that our brains are different in detail .
BCI technology not only advances our understanding of how the brain thinks and images, but also reveals the brain's neural patterns in these processes.
At Maastricht University in the Netherlands, computational neuroscientist Christian Herff and his team have been studying how the brain processes silent, imaginary language.
To do this, they developed a BCI implant that can generate language in real time when participants speak silently only in their minds.
The brain signals captured by this technology have similar areas and activity patterns to those of the actual speaker, although they are not identical.
This means that even those who are unable to speak in traditional ways can operate BCI units by imagining speaking.
This greatly expands the range of users.
Hopefully, studies have found that even if the body of a paralyzed person is unable to respond, their brains retain the ability to speak or move. This suggests that the brain has a strong plasticity that can reorganize neural pathways.
We now know that when the brain is affected by trauma or disease, the strength of the connections between neurons changes, and neural circuits may reconfigure, or new connections may be formed.
Mice with spinal cord injuries that originally controlled brain areas of paralyzed limbs were able to control parts of the body that were still functioning.
Now, BCI's research brings a new perspective to the field!
At the University of Pittsburgh, a team of neuroengineer Jennifer Collinger implanted an intracortical BCI in a male patient in his thirties who had suffered a spinal cord injury.
Surprisingly, Collinger's team found that the original neural map that controls the hand in the patient's brain was preserved.
When he attempted to move his fingers, the team observed activity in the movement area, although the fingers did not move.
In the case of a stroke, BCI can be used in combination with other methods to train new brain regions to take over the functions of the damaged area.
José del R., a neuroengineer at the University of Texas at AustinMillán, is working on the application of BCI-induced brain plasticity in **.
Millán trained 14 patients with chronic strokes.
In one group, BCI was connected to a functional electrical stimulation device.
When BCI recognizes that the participant is trying to stretch the hand, it stimulates the responsive muscles. The control group received a random electrical stimulus instead of a targeted stimulus.
The results showed that the participants of BCI-guided electrotherapy significantly enhanced the connectivity between motor areas inside the damaged cerebral hemispheres! The difference was significant in the control group.
As the ** progresses, the group members are gradually able to stretch their hands.
In Millán's research, BCI faciates the process of brain learning. This cycle of human-machine interaction is a central feature of BCI, making it possible to directly control brain activity.
Participants were able to learn how to adjust their attention to improve the output of the decoder in real time.
The team of neuroengineer Silvia Marchesotti at the University of Geneva found that when 15 healthy subjects learned to control non-invasive BCI, activity throughout the brain increased in frequency bands that are critical for language and became more focused over time.
This may indicate that the brain has become more efficient at controlling devices and requires fewer neural resources to complete tasks.
However, in general, the current scope of BCI research is still very limited, mainly involving brain regions related to motor function.
The progress of Neuralink has undoubtedly given another shot in the arm to the research of brain-computer interfaces around the world.
Kunpeng Project