Neuralink, the company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, will place microchips in the brains of patients with severe spinal cord injuries.
TheAre bionic superhumans coming soon? Anyway, it’s a good start. After the various electronic prosthetics that allow amputees to recover their lost sensations, now startup Elon Musk hopes to begin implanting chips in the brain in 2022. The first patients will be people with severe spinal cord injuries.
First medical use
according to interested in trade, the chip implanted in the brain will record and stimulate brain activity. This stimulation can help resolve some diseases including serious lesions of the spinal cord, as well as some neurological disorders.
in an interview in Long live the Wall Street JournalMusk was asked about these future projects. “Neuralink works well with monkeys and we’re doing a lot of testing (…) and we hope to replicate this in early humans, which will be people with severe spinal cord injuries like those with quadriplegia and quadriplegia,” he said.
Quadriplegia or quadriplegia is complete or partial paralysis of the arms and legs. Neuralink said the money it raised last July would go toward developing its chips. Target ? Enabling quadriplegic patients to control digital devices with their brains. Musk previously managed to get a monkey to play video games using an array of electrodes.
How it works ?
The researchers will implant electrodes into the part of the brain responsible for movement. This connection will create a network that will then transmit neural signals to the devices. So the user will be able to control it without going through a concrete connection. The wires of the electrodes are ten times thinner than a human hair. A delicate operation that will not be performed by human hands: only robots created specifically for the occasion (in development) will be able to handle and place these electrodes.
wider ambition
A project that Musk wants to develop on a larger scale. express in Twitter The significance of these first implants: “Replacing damaged or missing neurons with circuits is the correct way to look at them. Many problems can be solved simply by communicating signals between existing neurons. Progress will accelerate when we have devices in humans.”
However, these technological feats require precision and time. Data does not always correspond to the ambition of a billionaire. In 2019, Musk said Neuralink hopes to begin testing in humans by the end of 2020.
about the same topic ⋙ Will we all crack soon?
⋙ Equipped with a slide designed by Elon Musk, this monkey plays a video game by thinking
The Neuralink system can also be used to treat diseases of the brain, such as Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease. In the future, it is conceivable that humans will be equipped with new systems capable of improving cognitive abilities. Perhaps the future of humanity is super brains?
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