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Artificial Intelligence
Elon Musk Shows Neuralink’s Brain Implant in Live Pigs
AI-powered brain-machine interface makes progress towards human trials.
Posted August 29, 2020 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
The convergence of neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), and digitized health care is enabling the rapid acceleration of the emerging market of brain-machine interface devices.
On Friday, Neuralink, a startup based in Fremont, California in the San Francisco Bay Area, broadcasted a live demo with pigs to showcase its embedded brain-computer interface solution. Neuralink was founded in 2016 and has $158 million in funding from CEO and Co-founder Elon Musk according to Crunchbase.
“I’m really excited to show you what we’ve got,” Musk said. “I think it’s going to blow your mind.”
Neuralink is focused on producing an implanted device to solve a myriad of brain and spine disorders ranging from memory loss to brain damage. “The neurons are like wiring, and you kind of need an electronic thing to solve an electronic problem,” he said.
“All of your senses—your sight, hearing, feeling, pain—these are all electrical signals sent by neurons to your brain,” continued Musk. “And if you can correct these signals, you can solve everything from memory loss, hearing loss, blindness, paralysis, depression, insomnia, extreme pains, seizures, anxiety, addiction, strokes, brain damage—these can all be solved with an implantable neural link.”
According to Musk, current medical research says that reading neurons in a person’s brain is possible and he mentioned the Utah Array as a proof-of-concept. “But it’s kind of like a bed of rigid spikes that is literally inserted with an air hammer—so you know, it’s slightly discomforting, I think,” he said. “There’s wires and a box on your head, so there’s some infection risk. And obviously, it would look pretty weird if you’re walking around with boxes on your head.”
Regarding deep brain stimulation technology where electrodes are inserted in the brain, Musk says, “It’s a bit like kicking the TV—which does work, but not always, and it has limitations.” As an example, Musk cites the inability to read or write high-bandwidth information using deep brain stimulation. “Nonetheless, this has greatly helped over 150,000 people, so actually despite being somewhat of a brute force approach, it has been very effective for a lot of people, and this is what is currently available,” said Musk.
Since the summer of 2019, Neuralink has streamlined the design architecture by eliminating the part behind the ear and simplifying to a coin-link device. “In a lot of ways, it’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” Musk said.
Neuralink’s brain-computer interface device’s current version, Link V0.9, has 10 times the numbers of channels from existing devices with 1024 channels per link, a wireless range of 5 to 10 meters to the phone where the software application that manages the device would reside, all-day battery life, and induction charging. It measures 23 mm x 8 mm which is flush with the skull and therefore not visible, especially if the scar is underneath hair. “In fact, I could have a Neuralink right now, and you wouldn’t know—maybe I do,” added Musk playfully.
Musk says it has all the sensors that you would expect to see from a smartwatch or a phone, ranging from health monitoring to flagging possible heart attacks to playing music. “It’s sort of like if your phone went in your brain or something,” he stated.
To get Neuralink’s brain-computer interface implanted, Musk feels confident that the procedure would be an outpatient procedure that takes less than an hour and would not require general anesthesia. Musk plans for the procedure to be fully automated and performed by a surgical robot.
In a remarkable live demonstration with three living pigs, Musk first showed a normal pig with no brain implants, then one that had a Neuralink brain machine interface that was removed. The last pig, named Gertrude, currently has an embedded Neuralink device that was installed two months prior. In the demo, the neural activity of Gertrude’s brain was displayed in graphical format on a computer, with beeping sounds of real-time neuronal activity.
“The beeps that you are hearing are real-time signals from the Neuralink in Gertrude’s head,” said Musk. “So this Neuralink connects to neurons that are in her snout, so whenever she shuffles around and touches something with her snout, that sends out neural spikes which are detected here. And so, on-screen, you can see each of the spikes from the 1024 electrodes.”
In the live demo, whenever Gertrude’s snout touched objects such as food, the increase in neural activity was reflected in real-time both visibly and audibly on the computer display. There were pigs with multiple Neuralink devices embedded in their heads that were indistinguishable from the one without. All of the pigs in the demo were lively.
This showed the ability to read neuronal activities in real-time. To stimulate neurons, or to "write" to the brain, Musk cites criteria such as precise control of the electric field in space and time and a wide range of currents for different brain regions, without causing harm to the brain.
“By carefully controlling the electric field, you can actually have one electrode influence possibly 1,000 or 10,000 neurons,” he said. With multiple electrodes implanted, Musk stated that it’s possible to influence millions of neurons.
“The primary purpose of this demo is actually recruiting,” he stated candidly. The company is seeking to hire problem solvers in robotics, software, electronics, chip design, mechanical engineering, biology, surgery, neuroscience, chemistry, materials, and animal care—no prior experience on brains necessary.
Neuralink is making plans for human clinical studies. In July 2020, Neuralink received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Breakthrough Device Designation according to Musk. Pending requisite approvals and additional safety testing, Neuralink is quickly progressing towards human implantation.
“We are working closely with the FDA, and we’ll be extremely rigorous,” Musk said. “We will significantly exceed the minimum FDA guidelines for safety. We will make this as safe as possible. Just as with Tesla, while it is legally possible to ship a one-star car, at Tesla the only cars we make are five-stars in every category. We actually maximize safety, and we will take the same approach at Neuralink.”
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