Brain-computer interfaces have long been in the works, but now Musk is applying the accelerator. That could sink his own efforts, but might spur useful research too, finds Nicole Kobie.
Introduction
- A cure for paralysis and blindness that could one day allow humans to level up their own cognition - and all you have to do is trust the tech's most tempestuous CEO to plonk an implant into your brain.
- Elon Musk’s Neuralink has ambitions as lofty as SpaceX’s dream of a mission to Mars and Tesla’s fantasy of driverless cars. Founded in 2016. Neuralink is building an implantable brain-computer interface (BCD that would allow computers to read neural signals. That could, in theory, help anyone suffering paralysis, blindness, dementia or other brain diseases, but Musk also sees the technology as valuable to boost human capabilities. "It's like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy,” he said at a recruitment demonstration known as "Show and Tell” in November. Neuralink showed attendees a video of monkeys that spelt out the words “welcome to show and tell”. The previous year's demo involved a monkey playing a Pong-style game by thinking about moving the controller, while the year before a pig was shown with an embedded implant.
- Musk claims the technology will be ready to implant into a human brain within six months, and that he intends to have one surgically shoved into his own skull in a future demonstration. All this is subject to regulatory approval, which in the US is covered by the Food and Drug Administration. "Obviously, we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human, but we’ve submitted, I think, most of our paperwork to the FDA,” he said. It's worth noting that Neuralink has previously hoped to begin human trials in 2020, and Musk in 2021 said he hoped they’d begin in 2022.
- And there's already a challenge to that FDA approval. A complaint has been filed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, as well as a federal investigation into animal welfare, sparked by internal staff complaints that the company’s rushed development pace is causing unnecessary suffering. Neuralink also faces increasing competition from the likes of Science Corp, which is working to cure blindness, and Synchron, which is hoping to treat paralysis.
How it works
- At its most basic, Neuralink is a chip that’s stitched into the brain with tiny threads that pick up signals. If doctors want to read brain signals now, they attach electrodes to the skull; Neuralink is a miniaturised version that not only reads signals but sends them in order to tell a paralysed limb to move or - perhaps one day - control a smartphone without moving a muscle.
- “The basic idea isn’t science fiction.” noted Andrew Jackson, professor of neural interfaces at Newcastle University. As a neuroscientist with his own neurotech spinout, MintNeuro, Jackson has been controlling animal brains with computers since the early 2000s. “I was building a wearable electronic circuit that sat on the head of a monkey and was connected via electrodes to brain cells,” he told PC Pro. “We called it the neurochip back then.” The aim was to track brain activity in order to build connections to prosthetics, and his work has expanded into generating movements as well as suppressing epilepsy seizures.
- “I think the thing that people don’t often understand... is that this is a concept and an idea that’s been around for some time, ’ he said. “And impressive progress has been made." Indeed, Neuralink’s core idea has been demonstrated by researchers since the BrainGate trials in 2009. with implants in humans as early as 2002. And progress has continued, with a trial at Bristol’s Southmead Hospital helping to reverse symptoms of Parkinson’s in one patient using a deep-brain stimulation device.
- Beyond Musk’s showmanship and funding, what’s different with Neuralink? The form factor, for a start. The BrainGate trial used an implant called a Utah Array, which Jackson describes as a “bed of nails of 100 electrodes’. And while it works, that’s one of the core limitations to the existing technologies: the implanted electrodes exit through the skin to be plugged into external equipment.
- That’s the challenge Jackson is trying to solve at MintNeuro. which is working on a wireless design, and the core benefit of Neuralink’s design, which is low power and wireless in a tiny package. “What they’re doing well is developing low power wireless interfaces, so you can get rid of the cable through the skin, and making a reasonably small implant package that’s connected to lots of flexible electrodes, and speeding up the implantation of the device with surgical robots,” he said. “What they’re doing is quite sensible.’
- The biggest hurdles aren’t the hardware or the brain science, but where the two meet. “The challenges are always at the interface - it’s where the mushy biology bit meets the fabricated engineering bit," he said. “ if you put an electrode into brain tissue you can record nice bright signals on day one. but then over time the quality of those signals sort of deteriorates and might be unstable. That’s because of scar tissue building up around the electrodes.’
- Jackson said that from Neuralink’s public presentations, it seems the company may not be fully aware of such challenges, or underappreciates the hurdle they present. “Those are the kinds of things that are much more difficult to solve and the solutions aren’t what microelectronics fabrications are used to dealing with," he said.
- Jackson cautions that Neuralink hasn't yet released significant details about the hardware itself, with the product presentation actually part of a recruitment day rather than a technology demonstration. “I think the academics among us would prefer that there were scientific papers being published where we could see all of the details, but it’s sort of a culture clash." he said. “That's how academics work. But we have to sort of realise that's not how tech companies work."
Reading minds
- The tech challenges aren't small - though they are about size. Implants not only need to be tiny to reduce damage to the brain, they also require wireless links to avoid those cables through the skull, draw the lowest power imaginable, be rechargeable and support updates, which Neuralink has said will be possible. “All of that’s relatively easy given the kind of sophistication that we have with smartphones,” said Jackson.
- But challenges remain, particularly with decoding brain signals. It’s now easy to train a system to pick up a signal: tell a person to move to the left, or think about moving to the left, and record what their brain does. Eventually, a system can be told to look for that pattern. But what happens when we try to go beyond such simple decoding?
- “I think there’s a sense within the technology industry that all the problems go away if you can scale up to more and more data," said Jackson. "If you increase the bandwidth of things and increase the number of channels you get a Moore’s Law effect and the problems just fall away.”
- That did work with Al speech recognition, which required tons of training but is now commonplace. But reading more complicated signals, such as complex thoughts beyond ‘left’ or "right’, might not work that way. “If we get to the point where enough people have got brain implants and we can get these big data sets, is it going to turn out that the interface that has been trained on someone else's brain or a lot of other people’s brains then works for your brain without having to go through a training process?” asked Jackson.
- He added: “It’s not like I can identify a neuron, a single brain cell, in my brain that's analogous to one in your brain. That's not how brains work... all our brains are different.”
- What this means is that scaling the technology from simple animal games to mind-reading will take a long time and a lot of effort, and might not even be possible. “We don’t know whether it will scale the same way as speech decoding or if it’s just a fundamentally different kind of problem... but that’s not a reason not to try.” he said. “It's an interesting question... and you only find out by getting these kinds of devices into people’s brains.”
Leadership challenges
- The core idea behind Neuralink is sound, which is why others are also developing similar implants. And the technology could be genuinely useful. But Neuralink still faces challenges. The biggest of all might be Musk. His demand for fast development could be behind those animal testing complaints, with Reuters reporting that staff have suggested the high pressure environment - in which Musk urged staff to work faster by picturing a bomb strapped to their heads - was leading to fatal mistakes.
- Neuralink is reportedly under investigation by the US Department of Agriculture over animal testing complaints. Staff, once again according to Reuters, raised concerns over the pace of testing, saying it was causing unnecessary suffering and even deaths of animals by running trials concurrently rather than one at a time and waiting for results. Further complaints report surgical mistakes causing suffering to animals.
- Since 2018, 1,500 animals have been killed in Neuralink testing, though that doesn’t necessarily indicate wrongdoing. In response to the accusations, Neuralink has detailed its animal welfare policies, saying it exceeds industry standards. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has countered that the FDA should investigate. “The company’s own employees admit that its botched animal experiments may be suspect to regulators.” said Ryan Merkley of the Physicians Committee in a statement.
- Musk is famously in a rush - his claims that Tesla’s Autopilot mode is fully self-driving are repeatedly slapped down, even by his own executives - but Neuralink does face rising competition. That said, while founders want their company to become the first to achieve a tech milestone, those awaiting medical help want solutions that work properly - the rest of us are happy for multiple BCI suppliers, so having a robust industry is positive.
Culture clash
- As Neuralink is a private firm led by an infamously outspoken individual, there’s plenty it doesn’t have to share with the rest of us - this is the culture clash that Jackson referred to earlier. While researchers in the field are intrigued to know how the tech works, there is another key question: what’s the intent?
- We know Neuralink wants to cure blindness and physical paralysis, as well as brain diseases such as Parkinson’s. But Musk has also suggested the aim is to enhance humans, perhaps letting those with Neuralink implants “speak” telepathically, control devices with our minds, access memories, and even stream Spotify without headphones.
- Whether Neuralink is serious about such aims matters, argues Jackson, as it impacts the ethical equation. It’s worth testing on animals - or some believe it is - to help reduce human suffering, which is why we allow it for drug development, for example. But if the intent is to avoid putting on headphones, the balance shifts. “If your goal is to develop technologies to help severely disabled people, you can justify putting a device like this into someone's head," said Jackson. “It’s more difficult to justify if we're using disabled people as a stepping stone to collect the data sets that we’re going to use to develop the next generation of human-enhancement product.”
- On the other hand. Musk's fast pace of development could be damaging more animals than is necessary7, but could also mean quicker progress. Do researchers have a responsibility to work at pace when the goal is reducing human suffering? “There's a balance, and you can go too slowly,” Jackson said. “There are people out there who would benefit from his technology, assuming it works and it’s safe.”
What next?
- There’s another benefit to Neuralink: it draws attention to the field. The aim of the “show and tell” was recruitment, and shining a light on these technologies could help draw the best and brightest to the field. Jackson says he’s already unsure whether to advise students to stay in academia to work on such topics or to find a tech startup - it’s hard to see where the most progress will happen. It also draws investors, making it easier for rivals and new startups to find money. “I think it's really great for the field in a lot of ways, but there are also a lot of things that they need to do by the book," Jackson said.
- This research is unquestionably not new. and work was progressing before Neuralink joined the crowd. The troubles that follow Musk might distract Neuralink - and attract regulatory attention that derails the firm’s work - but the miniaturisation of chips and wireless tech means we’re ever closer to the day when someone regains sight or the ability to walk from a brain implant, whether it's made by Neuralink or not.
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