A second person will soon receive Neuralink’s experimental brain implant, according to company co-founder Elon Musk.
In A video update on WednesdayMusk said the surgery is planned for “next week or so.” The company is making changes to the surgical procedure and placement of the device to avoid problems that arose with its first participant, whose implant partially detached from the brain a few weeks after surgery.
Neuralink is developing a brain-computer interface, or BCI, that uses a person’s brain signals to control an external device. Its first product, called Telepathy, aims to help paralyzed people operate a computer using only their thoughts. Musk has said that Neuralink is working on a second productcalled Blindsight, to provide artificial vision to blind people.
“One way to think of the Neuralink device is like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch with little wires or electrodes,” Musk said in the video, which was streamed live on his social media platform, X. In the short term, the Neuralink device is intended to help people with disabilities, but Musk said his long-term goal is to use BCI technology “to mitigate the civilizational risk of AI by having a closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence.”
For now, the company is conducting an initial feasibility study to evaluate the safety and functionality of its device in people with paralysis. As part of the study, Noland Arbaugh became the first person to receive Neuralink’s brain implant in January. Arbaugh is paralyzed from the shoulders down due to a swimming accident that occurred in 2016.
The coin-sized Neuralink implant sits in the skull and has 64 flexible wire strands thinner than a human hair that extend into the brain tissue. Each strand contains 16 electrodes that pick up desired movement signals from neurons.
At first, the device worked as expected. Arbaugh could use a cursor just by thinking about it, allowing him to play video games, email friends and surf the Internet. But a few weeks after the surgery, the implant began to malfunction and Arbaugh lost control of the cursor.
in a May Blog Entry On its website, Neuralink said a number of wires had retracted from Arbaugh’s brain, resulting in a net decrease in the number of effective electrodes. In response, Neuralink modified its neural recording algorithm to be more sensitive and improved the way it translates neural signals into cursor movements.
Arbaugh is back to using a computer with his brain, although only 15 percent of the implant’s wires are still working, according to Neuralink executives. In an interview with WIRED, Arbaugh said the device has given him back a sense of independence.
Still, Neuralink is trying to avoid the same problems with its second study participant. “We really want to make sure that we make as much progress as possible between each Neuralink patient,” Musk said Wednesday.
During the video update, company executives acknowledged that there was air trapped inside Arbaugh’s skull after the surgery, which could have contributed to the threads coming out. Matthew MacDougall, director of neurosurgery at Neuralink, said the company is taking steps to eliminate this air pocket in its second volunteer. It also plans to insert the threads deeper into the brain tissue and track the movement of those threads.
“You might think that the most obvious mitigation for wires coming out of the brain is to insert them deeper. We think so too, so we’re going to expand the range of depths at which we insert the wires,” MacDougall said.
Additionally, the company’s surgeons plan to “sculpt the surface of the skull” to minimize the space under the implant so that it aligns with the normal contour of the skull. This, MacDougall said, should “minimize the space under the implant” and “position it closer to the brain and take some of the stress off the threads.”
Musk said he hopes to implant the Neuralink device in a “high single-digit” number of study participants this year. Neuralink listing on ClinicalTrials.gov (It says the company plans to enroll three participants in its current study.)
He added that Neuralink is working on a next-generation implant that has 128 threads, each with eight electrodes per thread, a change he said will “potentially double the bandwidth if we’re precise with the placement of the threads.” Musk did not provide a timeline for when that device will be ready to be tested on people.
