The neuralink company may be ready to perform brain implants in humans within six months, its founder and owner announced last night, Elon Muskin a conference call from its headquarters in Fremont, California.
The process, Musk said, is advanced in terms of the necessary permits from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which authorizes all types of medical devices on the market, including brain devices.
Until now, the FDA has been concerned regarding the possible overheating of the implant (which includes microwires in brain tissue), as they might result in the leakage of chemical elements from the implant into the brain mass, Musk clarified in the question session.
The function of the implant will be to “read” brain activity to be able to transmit, via bluetooth, orders to a computer. One goal is to help restore severely damaged brain functions following a heart attack or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which result in severe damage to communication skills.
Musk showed a video where a monkey with one of these implants is seen, and that apparently is capable of moving a cursor on a screen towards some letters. “He’s moving the cursor with his mind,” Musk said. “Not that he can write, I don’t want to exaggerate.”
The implant will have the size of a coin and its installation will require extracting a similar volume of the brain, which differentiates it from other devices tested by neurological companies that have proposed similar devices without such an invasive intervention, according to the Bloomberg agency.
“Hypothetically, I might have the device implanted right now and you wouldn’t even notice,” Musk said at the conference.
Until now, brain implants have only been developed in one direction: from the brain to the outside (usually a computer that processes the signals), but the Neuralink project aims to be able to transfer information in the other direction as well, towards the brain.
Neuralink is developing two types of implants in parallel, one to restore vision “even to those who have never had it” and another to restore basic bodily functions in people paralyzed by damage to the spinal cord.
