“Our overall goal of enabling very high bandwidth connection between the brain and your and the rest of the world and your computers. The long-term goal which sounds a little esoteric is to mitigate the risk of, the civilization risk, of AI, by having a sort of closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence. But that that’ll take many years. Along the way we’re going to help solve a lot of brain injury or spinal injury issues… We want to give people superpowers so it’s not just that we’re restoring your prior brain functionality but that you actually have functionality far greater than a normal human. That’s a super big deal.”
welcome I hope this is working welcome to neuralink up live update we’re going to tell you about the progress of the first patient with the neuralink and a recap of the progress there then talk about what uh changes we were’re making for the second patient which we’re hoping to do an implant in the next week or so and this is for our first product which is called leathy which enables you to control a computer or a phone just by thinking so let’s in fact so so we’ll start off with just some introductions DJ want to start hi everyone my name is DJ SA I’m an electrical engineer and a chip designer by training I led the design of first several generations of the neuralink implant currently I was on the founding team and currently a president I’m Matthew McDougall I’m a practicing neurosurgeon and head of neurosurgery at nurlink yeah go ahead yeah head of brand interfaces applications and I’m Bliss I’m a software engineer at nink trying to figure out how to turn brand activity into cool stuff in the world all right thank you so let’s see so we’ll just get going into the presentation our first product is something I said we call telepathy which is an enables the person with neuralink implant to control their phone or computer just by thinking and once you can control your phone or computer you can essentially control almost anything just and literally just by thinking so there’s no eye tracking or anything it is purely your thoughts this is really qu quite a profound device that can help a lot of people who have lost the connection between their their brain and body imagine people like Stephen hulking who imagine if he could communicate at the same speed as someone who had still had the connection to their brain and body it’s really something that can help millions of people around the world and it’s a it’s part of our overall goal of enabling very high bandwidth connection between the brain and your and the rest of the world and your computers the long-term goal which SEL esoteric is to mitigate the risk of the civiliz risk of AI by having a sort of closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence but that that that’ll take many years along the way we’re we’re going to help solve a lot of brain injury or spinal injury issues then without first product telepathy that’s going to really quite profound that there is also potential longterm for Bridging the the gaps if there are damaged or severed neurons being able to span the gap between the brain’s motor cortex to the spine to enable someone to use their body again I think that would be very exciting and it’s that that is something that is possible in the long term and then our second product which we’ve demonstrated to work with monkeys is uh Blind Side which would enable someone who is completely blind lost both eyes or completely lost their optic nerve to be to see so that’s something that we hope to demonstrate in the future so this just gives you a sense of what the device is a way to think about the neur rolling device is like a a Fitbit or an Apple Watch with tiny wires or electrodes those tiny wires are implanted in the brain and they read and write electrical signals uh a lot of people think the brain is this incredibly mysterious thing it’s it is mysterious in a lot of ways but it is actually it does operate with electrical signals so if you can readand write those electrical signals you can interface with the brain and the device is sized so that it is the same size as the piece of skull that is removed so if it’s like a few centime diameter of skull that’s removed we replace that with the device after implanting the tiny wires with the surgical robot and that enables uh read write capability to the neurons yes exactly it’s completely wirelessly I could have a neuralink right now you wouldn’t know and it charges inductively so you could just basically have an electromagnetic pad that that you charge the device with yeah it’s like an Apple Watch exactly so except that it’s actually a much harder technical challenge to solve given that there’s limit as to how much eat the brain tissue whereas in for phones and really care it’s sitting on a table sure yeah it’s got to go through skin and stuff as well in our Cas so it’s it is a tougher challenge to charge and to have highand with Communications given that it’s got to go through skin and hair and stuff we have solved it but we have solved it yeah yeah so our first step with the telepathy is basically to unlock digital Independence for people with paralysis and to allow them control the computer just with their mind with about moving the body and our goal is to provide them the same level of control functionality and reliability that I have when I’m using a computer even better than the level of control I have it’s not a high bar for you to be clear this guy he’s controlling this with his brain so he’s not you can’t see his hands in this video but he’s not using a mouse and keyboard just thinking about how to move the cursor and playing civilization no ey tracker there’s no ey track he’s live like you watch this on Twitter just thinking that’s it just thinking a couple days cursor move here yeah this is like last two nights ago something yes yeah I think the way he also described it is he’s using the there’s many more videos on his the platform yeah so he can he’s stream that live and also can talk and move his head with prob mul yeah you can Al if you join his live stream you can ask him questions he’ll tell you all about what it’s like to move also I think I I haven’t played civilization myself but I think this is actually not easy mode this is expert mode this is Emperor mode Emperor mode if you have played s Emperor mode is like the highest difficulty level just the point is this is a cognitively demanding task while live streaming playing the hardest mode of the game and he’s able to do that while yeah talking engaging with the audience while playing one of the other games he likes to play a lot is chess I think it gets lost sometimes that he’s actually playing speed chess against me yeah which requires an incredibly High Fidelity degree of control and and speed of control in order to be able to win so also another cool stuff about our device is that use it anywhere anytime also on a plane during a flight while creting really cool memes of also our device unlocks things that previously were impossible for participant for example we’re able to connect him to his gaming consoles switch and play Mario Kart with friends and family and it was lovely to see them playing together after years that he couldn’t do it since he’s injured imagine if you’re sitting one row over from this guy play over he’s making a cat me no hands no movement a world world yeah it’s time yeah and he loves using the device and using independently daily to watch videos read play games using the browser and the key metrics that we carry is to make sure our device is actually useful is to basically the amount of hours we use the device daily and weekly and we track it since the since the surgery and on weeks that he’s not too busy and not traveling he can even reach 70 hours of using the device a week this is amazing and he would of course love to use it more but need to run and he needs to sleep sometimes and also of course to charge the device once in a while hopefully we’ll improve that over time I think maybe not obvious to people who are watching this like it’s a normal mathbook he’s controlling this isn’t like some limited edition thing there’s only a few options like you can just do anything that you can do on a MacBook Pro same one I have on my desk actually it’s the exact same one and maybe another interesting point is that on the first day he used BCI was able to break the previous world record for cursor control just by using the brain and recently he even doubled it and was able to outperform about 10% of our engineered neuralink and you can be sure that we are very good in this game and very quick and if you want to check out how well how you can do it you can do it on our website and it’s very addictive games yeah it’s a very simple game you just have to click on the Square but it actually even though it sounds silly it’s it’s quite a yeah it can be quite it sounds like it can be quite addictive and it’s especially if you get a low score and you think there’s no way I got to any anyone who wants to try this I recommend going to the neurol link.com website and seeing seeing if you can beat Nolan’s record and it’s you will’ll find that’s actually quite difficult to do this is really with version one of the device and with only a small percentage of the electrodes that are working so this is really just the beginning but even the beginning is twice as good as the world record this is important to emphasize the the media has a habit of of saying that the glass is 10% empty but actually it’s 90% full I think it’s really quite an accomplishement of the nuring team to have achieved with the first Patient First device twice the world record for the brain to computer bandwidth that’s really an astonishing an amazingly great outcome and it’s only going to be get better from here so the potential is to ultimately get I think to megabit level so that’s part the long-term goal of improving the bandwidth of the brain computer interface if you think about like how low the bandwidth normally is between a human and a device it’s the average bandwidth is extremely low it’s it’s I say less than one bit per second over the course of a day if there are 86,400 seconds in a day you’re outputting less than that number of bits to any any given device except in perhaps very rare circumstances this is actually quite important for AI race for for human AI symbiosis is just being able to communicate at a speed yeah I can follow yeah just to emphasize again he’s performing at this extremely high level with about 15% of his channels and so we want to mitigate any of the problems that led to that situation the brain is a fascinating organ I’ll share with you some of the secrets about the brain during any typical brain surgery a small amount of air is introduced into the skull that’s because neurosurgeons like to have as much room as possible around the brain and so there’s this little known control mechanism of allowing the concentration in the blood to rise a bit which allows the brain to either expand or contract depending on where you target that CO2 but typically neurosurgeons will have the brain shrink by lowering CO2 what we’re going to do in our future surgeries is keep the CO2 concentration actually quite normal maybe even slightly elevated and that’ll allow the brain to stay its normal size and shape during surgery that should eliminate this air pocket that we saw in the first participant that air pocket we think may have contributed to eating up some of the threat slack is as the air bubble migrated to be under the implant push the brain away from the implant and so that’s easy enough to fix another consideration that we want to focus on for our upcoming participants is that the brain think of it like a really complex folded onion it’s layer upon layer of sheets of neurons all over the surface of the brain folded into this oddl looking shape the folds of the brain travel down deep into the brain and and along with it Go those layers of neurons and if we insert very close to one of the folds where there may be very useful information encoded in neurons we may end up traveling with our threads parallel to some of the layers of neurons that we’re most interested in avoiding them entirely to avoid that possibility we’re going to insert in our future participants more close to the middle of the apex of the folds ensuring that we’re crossing the layers of Interest layer five of the cortex I also think that it’s important to highlight here those tiny wires that Elon mentioned they’re fraction of a human hair they’re very flexible intentionally so cuz brain’s constantly moving and you want electrodes to be moving with the brain causing less of the scarring and it’s it’s actually impossible for a human however talented Matthew is to actually maneuver them we have a surgical robot that we built that can actually precisely Target them in any threedimensional space XY as well as Z with Micron level Precision while avoiding bascur so that you don’t disrupt and cause immune response from happening so we actually have the technology to be able to place them exactly where we want them yeah it was truly amazing to see the surface of the brain after the robot had inserted all the electrodes on the first participant without a drop of blood in sight is really quite an achievement yeah so something that probably most people don’t realize is that the brain appears to be somewhat undifferentiated so if you look at the cortex it looks like a whole bunch of folds that were maybe like it’s not obvious just looking at a say a picture of the brain that that it’s the brain is highly differentiated that there’s you pretty much know exactly where the part of the brain is that controls your right hand and your left hand and your leg and that kind of thing or Vision it’s actually quite precisely located it’s not so some people like might think look at the brain like oh could be it could be anywhere but actually we it’s brain is highly differentiated even though it doesn’t look it’s yeah do you want to describe how we actually where like how we identify where the drill the que yeah so we can put a patient that is considering this implant into an MRI so functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and ask them to imagine hand movements that because of the spinal cord injury don’t happen but just imagining those hand movements causes these areas of the brain to light up in the fmri scanner so we have a pretty good idea based in fact for each individual participant which part of their brain is going to respond to imagined movements of the hand and so we can map those imagined movements much as we all do when moving a mouse to controlling a cursor on a screen even without the use of a mouse yeah but anyway I think this is an important point that it’s not like your the part of your brain that controls your hand might be anywhere in the cortex it’s this is not the case it’s going to be in a very specific region and it’s going to be Precision is key to yeah the left-handed right-handed B my mind too if you’re right-handed you want the device on the left side yeah not your lateral side to the hand that’s dominant yeah the left side of your brain controls right side of your bra another of the risk mitigations we’re looking at in the future is that the implant has a certain size the depth of the bottom of the implant actually thinner than the average human skull so what we want to be able to do is control size of the Gap under the implant give the threads that travel from the implant into the brain as much slack as possible we didn’t do this in the first participant because we didn’t want to manipulate any of their tissue that we didn’t absolutely have to in upcoming implants our plan is to sculpt the surface of the skull very intentionally to minimize the Gap under the implant such that the bottom of the Imp travels perfectly flush with the normal Contour of the inner side of the skull that will put the implant closer to the brain it will eliminate some of the tension on the threads and we think it will reduce some of the tendency of threads to retract and we actually built a tool to do yeah this this is actually this is a very important detail you really want the inner Contour of the skull to be flush so the implant there’s no the brain doesn’t want to pucker up into the into the Gap that’s really quite a big deal minimizing the air pocket and the implant being flushed with the the the inside Contour of the skull or two very important the additional benefit here is that you do see some amount of stick up what we call stick up so you minor bump in the head but this actually eliminates that even further yes really our goal is that that if you run your hand over the top of the skull you don’t feel any bump you don’t feel any device and that even if someone was bold you wouldn’t really even notice it and and then from the in inner Contour of the skull that the brain from a physical standpoint doesn’t really notice that there’s a divot in the skull because there’s no divot okay another aspect of of the human brain that obviously differs from any of the animals that we tested in is that the human brain is a lot bigger and so you may not realize that means the the human brain moves quite a bit more than any of these other smaller brained creatures and so when we open the skull we see the brain travel toward and away from the robot about 3 millim in total as the heart beats and and the breathing takes place and so that movement it it adds a small challenge for the robot in precisely choosing a depth to insert each thread it’s not an enormous Challenge and we’ve already upgraded the robot’s capabilities to be able to even more precisely Target depth in even a very rapidly moving brain with a high amplitude of movement you may think the most obvious mitigation for Threads that pulled out of the brain is to insert them deeper we think so too and so we’re going to broaden the range of depths at which we insert threads for the very first participant we had an enormous amount of data from our animal work and we had very highly optimized our insertion depth to maximize the CR crossing of the layers of interest in the cortex with the electrodes that we’re recording from now that we know retraction is a possibility we’re going to insert at a variety of depths that even in several cases of differing amounts of retracting threads we’re going to have electrodes at the proper depth and with the deepest threads be able to track how much retraction has occurred across the surface of the brain from each thread and so we’re going to both have more threads in the right layer and have better data on how much retraction has occurred if you’re a BCI nerd you might know that being able to control individual Z depth per thread is not something that most neural interface devices offer most neural interface devices are static fixed rigid array that you push in and all the electrodes are at one depth to be able to do this is actually pretty pretty novel part of the robot yeah the historical approach is to actually pound in a sort of bed of nails with an air hammer into the brain it look crazy that that yeah just m camera this this is it sounds somewhat barbaric this is not what we do but this is what’s been done before is literally just hammering in what looks like a better Nails the brain which actually works it’s astonishing that it actually works some people like manually like DBS probes you’re just sticking in by hand just gu those are several orders of magnitude more volume of brain tissue that you’re destroying compared to what we’re doing but that deep brain stimulation stuff does actually work actually helps people a lot yeah yeah yeah that’s a great product but I think we’ll we’ll be able to do a much more finessed version of that down the road it’s really difficult the neuralink device is something that really absolutely minimizes damage to the brain absolutely minimizes is the load on the patient and the goal is to allow someone to live a completely normal life you won’t even notice that someone even has the device so like I said RIS ability to control your computer and phone that’s telepathy and then next device being able to allow people to see that could not see before and in fact you can laugh people to see Jord Le Forge in Star Trek in any what whatever infrared yeah infrared ultraviolet radar so I think another way of saying it is that we want to give people superpowers so it’s it’s not just that we’re restoring your prior brain functionality but that you actually have functionality far greater than a normal human that’s a super big deal and I also think often times the questions that we get a lot is why do you have to actually go into the brain what if you place it on the surface or outside the skull basically the long story short the physics of how it works you really need to get the sensors which are these facing in the brain next to the source which as close to it as possible otherwise what you get is you get a population response and not be able to do the level of controls that we believe of yeah a good sort of analogy would be like if you’re trying to understand what goes on in a factory you need to go into the factory you can’t just put a stethoscope on the wall and try to figure out what’s going like anything on the outside of the trying to read things from the outside is like putting a stethoscope on the wall of a factory trying to understand what’s going in the factory it’s not going to be effective you got to be threads that go to be in there but I just want to be emphasize again like the goal is to give people superpowers not just to restore prior functionality that’s very exciting and I think that should give hope to a lot of people in the world that the future is going to be exciting and inspiring and the technology is going to give them superpowers that’s amazing yeah yeah could can you multitest with it yeah in fact you look at Nolan’s streaming and you can just check out noan streams on the xplatform he’s multitasking all the time so he’s while talking and listening to podcast yeah exactly it’s it’s really just if you’re using your hands and you’re playing a video game while talking don’t take a word for it just go watch I mean he’s out there on the internet doing his thing yeah yeah exactly so can you do keyboard shortcuts or is it just the mouse yeah that’s actually what we’re working on right now So currently he’s walking the mouse but we are also exploring recording more Dimensions out from the new activity multiple clicks so to do shortcuts or just able to control more gamesbook controller but also in the future we exp we plan to expand to decode text not just the mouse control but also allow participant to yeah actually so maybe going back to the discussion of thread retraction one of the very exciting parts to me about this story is that we’re able to do so much with 15% of channels when you have more channels what that actually offers you is not just faster Mouse CU in the motor cortex neurons don’t all represent the same thing so if you’re trying to understand what an individual finger is trying to do you might or might not have an electro next to it and the more channels you have in the brain the higher likelihood you have representation or decodability of all fingers on the hand so if you’re trying to do something like output text at a fast rate is something that matters a lot for people who are completely locked in who cannot speak at all who are trying to just say I love you to them to a loved one in their family or ask for a glass of water a scratch or whatever being able to type it a faster it’s extremely important and the more fingers you have access to higher probability you can do that effici yeah I’m super excited about how ceiling is we can get to as we resolve this D traction issue yeah we’re currently at approximately 10 10 B per second be great but ultimately we want to get to megabit and I think ultimately whole brain interface I think many years from now I think gigabit level as possible so that’s pretty astonishing now with this is still version one of out of ice as we mentioned it’s version one with only 15% of the threads working the current device has 64 threads with 16 electrodes on each thread our next device has uh threads with with eight electrodes per thread because as we get more confident about how where exactly to place the the thread you you need fewer electrodes per thread so we can essentially with the current divide without substantial changes double the bandwidth if if we accurate with the placement of of the threads and then our next Generation device will have maybe even more channels yeah yeah yeah so next device we aiming for yeah 3,000 channels this will just keep getting better and better really moving up I think in or of magnitude in factors of 10 basically in what kind of bandwidth I think it won’t be it won’t be all that long before someone with a neuralink device can communicate faster than someone who is has a fully functional body and I think faster than the fastest speed typist or auctioner the Esports tournaments are going to be like you won’t be able to speak faster than someone can communicate with a neuralink telepathy device maybe a very interesting part of this basically we currently connect to standard inputs to the computer to mouse and keyboard but very soon as we will have a much hard bandwidth we need to think about new ways to actually build the interface for the devices this is something that we excited yeah no that’s a good point because the current input devices are centered around human hands y so it’s like we’ve got these little meat sticks that we move and um there’s certain rate at which you can move your little move your fingers and so we’ve got like The Mouse and the keyboard and with the joystick control Xbox controller or something like that but you really don’t need that you can actually you don’t need since you’re no long if you’re not trying to use your hands you don’t you actually don’t need those conventional control mechanisms and so this why ultimately I think you’ll be able to do conceptual telepathy like where you can communicate entire Concepts to someone else with a neural link or to the computer even today we have some problems here where if you don’t feel the mouse clicking under your finger how do you know it actually happened you’re seeing it on the screen but you don’t actually feel the mouse click you don’t have the apprpriate acceptive feedback of the keys under your fingertips or the trackpad under your so there’s all sorts of interesting ux challenges how to to actually give the user some sense of what their decoder is actually doing or what the nerling is actually doing when they’re trying to use wireless yeah it’s Bluetooth just a Bluetooth connection just like how your normal Apple mouse or like apple magic keyboard connects to your computer same exact thing in fact in yeah we can basically have this exposed as an HID interface if we want it’s just the name of the protocol for sending bits from a mouse into a computer yeah I can plug into basically anything yeah I think we we chose that interface because it’s ubiquitous basically any devices are have Bluetooth capabilities our our long-term goal is to actually have our own protocol that is safe and secure but for now you know we’ve chosen it for interoperability question is can a neuralink chip prepare the paralysis in the long term we can’t do that right now we have done preliminary work implanting a second neuralink in the spinal cord and uh we can restore naturalistic looking hand and leg movements in animal models but this isn’t something that is don’t hold your breath waiting for it it’s going to be a while we’ve got a lot of work to do but yeah there’s no reason in theory that we can’t repair paralysis yeah essentially there’s no physics barrier to fully solving paralysis that is perhaps a way to say it that you’ve got signals coming from your motor cortex that if they are transferred past the point where nerves are damaged essentially just it’s basically a Communications Bridge so you bridge the communications from the motor cortex past the point in the necr spine where the nose are damaged and you should like it is physic it is possible from a physic stand point to restore full body functionality it’s a very hard technical problem but there is nothing that prevents it happening from a physics standpoint in terms of next phases of roll out we we really want to make sure that we make as much progress as possible between each neuralink patient so this is we’re only just moving now to our second neuralink patient but we we hope to have if if if things go well High single digits this year and I don’t know maybe this is somewhat dependent on regulatory approval and how much technical progress we make but within a few years hopefully thousands yeah and I think one thing that is important to highlight is that it’s not that we built only one device and one surgery we’ve done hundreds of surgery we built thousands and thousands of devices even for just the the ability to Earth any sort of low frequency failure mode we have already been investing very heavily in infrastructure to be able to scale this thing on the device manufacturing side as well as on the surgery side of things we want to be able to help as many people as quickly as we go through obviously the appropriate hurdles that are regulatory challenges and proving out that the device with yeah the the device implantation really needs to become almost entirely if not entirely automatic in the same way that’s a lasic isoy is done you don’t have an opthalmologist with a a laser cutter by hand that would be crazy but the opthalmologist oversees the lasic machine and make sure that the settings are correct and then the the machine does everything and restores your eyesight it’s really remarkable how how many people have had their eyesight restored with lasic and I think there’s another one called smile it’s they keep making it better we need to have something similar for a neuralink implantation so that you basically sit down and whatever the the what what kind of upgrades or Rin fixes are needed that’s reviewed by medical exper so we want to make sure that it’s reviewed correctly but it really needs to be automatic so you sit down and within 10 minutes you have a neur device installed very fast it’s very cyberpunk DSX if you play it those games when will a neur start to interface with other devices like wheelchair this great question we currently focusing on controlling computers and unlock Independence in the virtual world of course our plan is as you mentioned earlier robotic arm and wheelchair Independence in physical world this of course add additional risk if you make M your computer there’s some to that but we are working with the FDA to allow us to do well seems if the wheelchair has an app the wheelchair just needs to have have an interface so if the wheelchair has a Bluetooth interface you could just Bluetooth interface to the wheelchair and that’s probably something we should do pretty soon really matter of paperwork you don’t drive off a CLI I think we can limit the speed so so it doesn’t go creting into dister but it go slowly at first but yeah so being able to really the neur device should work generally for anything that’s got a Bluetooth interface including potentially an Optimus yeah you yes you could communicate with Optimus yep absolutely Optimus will you also be able to talk to Optimus but like why not just beam it but you could just yeah instead of talking you could just beam it directly or if someone has lost the use of speech then they can still communicate to an Optimus they can communicate telepathically to Optimus or by Bluetooth and and so even if someone has completely less the ability to speak they could still control or their computer or phone also if you have an Optimus and you have a ner you can justly map the brain signal to control of the physical arm of the robot and that’s a very meaningful thing if you’re folks that have spin cord injury one of the biggest requests is to be able to scratch yourself is something that quite annoying actually and if you have a scratch on your face you can’t fall asleep until you scratch it it’s very convenient to be able to move something physically towards you to be able to scratch similar things like eating food if you need somebody to feed you very hard to have dinner with friends in a way that is normal social experience and so if you can feed yourself pick up a fork and actually eat a piece of chicken on your own that’s a big deal it prevents and saves a lot of interactions with caretakers and other people on your life that you rely on to take care of you it really increases your I think an exciting possibility long term also is to say if you take parts of the optim Optimus humanoid robot and you combine that with a neuralink let’s say somebody has lost their arms or legs we we could actually attach an Optimus arm or Optimus legs and do a neuralink implant so that the the motor commands from your brain that goat would go to your biological arms now go to your robot arms or robot legs and again you have basically cybernetic superpowers actually so the latency from the nurlink to your hand would probably be slightly faster than it is just to go to your physical hand so you can imagine if you’re a piano player or I don’t know anything that requires extremely fast hand movements that you could actually have a pretty imbalanced right-and robotic arm control versus left-and physical Arm Control that’s one of them yeah like I said it’s just a cyberpunk dosx in a future where you have cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your biological and certainly that we’ll have a much as as particularly as we expand to a large number of customers or patients for neural length the understanding of the brain will improve dramatically because really there isn’t a fine very fine grained understanding of the brain today because there just the sensors aren’t good enough you got fmri which is pretty good but it’s still not as good as actually having high bandwidth electroids in the brain yeah I think this is under appreciated as a research tool to move that whole effort forward of really knowing what the physical substance of human thought is we don’t know to the degree that we need to so neuralink is actually a very powerful research tool yeah I think we can ultimately understand and fix quite severe psychosis or if somebody’s got like the if somebody’s got like a delusion that they have a chip in their brein I was wondering if you’re going to mention that one we just want to be clear that there’s only one person with a neuralink chip in their brain so for people out there who think we’ve put a chip in their brain we would like to assure you or what it’s worth you probably won’t believe us but we did not put a chip in your brain okay so this actually a remarkable number of people who think we have put a trip in their brain but we have not but in the future if you would like us to put a trip in your brain which will perhaps help with the issue of thinking that you have a chip in your brain then we will be able to do there are people that have severe schizophrenia they’ve got basically things that their brain is malfunctioning in some way and and this is actually due to really like physical circuitry issues you can think of the brain as really it’s a it’s a biological computer and if if some of the circuits are crossed it’s going to you know it’s going to crash it’s is going to have issues that but with a neuronic device we can fix those issues and if someone who think has say severe schizophrenia or or psychosis of some kind allow them to live a normal life I think that is one of the likely things in the future yeah you can certainly imagine I’m sure people have like parents grandparents who have memory that’s not working as well as it used to be sometimes they they forget who who their grandchildren are or or what day it is and this is something that a neur link device could help fix that’s actually one of the personal reason in many way for you’re you’re literally losing part of your identity which is a just a very yeah it’s really just it’s a glitch in the biological computer that is a fixable glitch it’s a short circuit essentially how does the device charge and how long does the charge last yeah so the current version that Nolan has it lasts between four to 5 hours on a charge and it takes about minutes to charge thing we’ve learned from Nolan is that’s actually one of the main limiters for him using it more it’s actually pretty hard to use a product more than like 70 hours a week but that’s about what he has used it for in some weeks yeah 70 hours a week yeah just for it’s like you sleep roughly 8 hours a night so that’s we’re doing better than the bed like the bed is 56 hours a week of use roughly and so 70 hours a week of uses I challenge you to think about products that you’ve actually use for that duration that’s again some of these points are worth like emphasizing again like the that Noland our first neur link recipient has used the rolling device for 70 hours in a week which is incredible probably won’t enjoy that I’m sharing his computer use publicly but I mean I sh use for productive things only no but actually so one of the things we’ve learned is that in the next version of the device we really need to double or increase that battery life and so I I think DJ the next version is going to be double actually double without without increasing the Char correct same charging time double the battery life meaning you should get roughly eight hours of use and the goal is to actually get to all day use so you can just charge maybe in your sleep sleeping pillow exactly as soon as you got 16 hours of usage then you basically have 24 hours of usage because it can charge while you’re sleeping one other thing that’s important I think to call out here is if you’re paralyzed you can’t you know put the charger over your head yourself and so it’s important to think about it’s not just a duration of batter use but also can you recharge it yourself independently so we spend a lot I’m thinking about how to make that feasible because then that means that you can this is what Nolan does you can use the device charge it use the device charge it use the device without needing anybody to come in and help you with that which is a big deal if you’re trying to play SI until 5:00 a.m. at night when your family’s asleep and the way in which he does that is that there is a charger coil that’s a bigger about this big and we actually put it in the sleeve of a of a hat or a beanie and then he wears it and then says with the voice command charge charger energize that’s the one he lik how writing work yeah the current Nolan has is is reading so it’s trying to read his essentially wrist movement from one one hand that’s also with pointing out in the future would pretty cool to into a second implant that would allow the other hand to be used and also have higher obviously higher active electroid count so then you could play essentially play games two-handed because that’s Norm only how you play games and but then with writing it’s really just a it’s an electrical impulse instead of reading electrical impulses from the neurons you issue an electrical impulse which is obviously critical for vision so vision is writing which is just triggering electrical impulse in the vision part of the brain and that activates a pixel so we we actually do have this working in monkeys and we had have working with monkeys for a while now where you can flash a pixel and then you watch where the monkey obviously the monkey what that monkey a little surprised to see hey there’s a flash here and a flashy there but it’s gets used to it after a while but it just you can see that that the pixel is in the right location because the monkey’s eyes will Dark to that location it’s not on on the screen there’s no pixel on the screen there’s no pixel on screen pixel in your brain yeah just like you just verify that that you’re triggering a pixel in the right part of the brain so know the initial resolution for vision will be relatively low sort of Atari Graphics type of thing but over time it could potentially be better than normal vision applications as Bliss mentioned there is there’s a proceptive feedback there’s a tactile feedback especially for robot arm like you’re trying to grasp a cup you need to know you got it one one an egg to know it’s a very much a delicate balance of not just initiating the movement but getting the feedback and controlling it accordingly so there there there is a subeta sensory cortex toov any changes in neural growth after device is inserted we don’t see any signs of neural damage but I and I guess we we have seen some rebound on some of the electrodes right correct and then also rain is very plastic it’s not that plastic it does diminish quite a bit after each 20 throughout childhood especially when you get to about 25 brain really done cooking there are there is a little bit of damage done with each insertion but it’s a minuscule amount compared to anything else out there and it’s an easy amount of damage to recover from and it’s really only detectable on cutting pieces of the brain after after the animals no longer alive and looking at them under a microscope you can’t really tell during life that there’s been any another way to interpret this question have the changes in neural growth after the device is inserted one way to interpret that is like the user learning how to use the device and I think on that side of things there’s been tremendous progress he’s put in hundreds of hours trying to figure out the best way to use this device cuz he really thinks that he can figure this out he can help share this knowledge he’s like on Friday night at 8:00 p.m. he’s starting a session of figuring out himself how to push his own performance to the next level and that’s really a unique learning process cuz there’s not many people in the world that have had the experience of moving something and so there’s a lot of nuance to okay how exactly should I imagine or attempt to move my wrist to get that thing to yeah he’s really died that into it also just the sheer number of hours that he’s even in the past six months right in many ways he’s using it in his travel in it’s plain right effectively PCI has left the lab yeah one of the questions is how close are we converting thoughts into text right right now it’s more about moving Cur from the screen on on a virtual keyboard but long term you should be able to really transmit entire words faster than anyone could possibly type I’m able to type hello world today but we’re still in the early days making that a POS experience the other things that we’re looking at is sign language right at the end of the day it is a movement of in yeah it’s true was the brain trying to naturally push the threads out this is a universal feature of any implant in the body the body tries to reject it and the goal of the surgeons and the technology team is to fight that and so with artificial hips and with bruise in the spine we’ve done a really good job of finding biocompatible materials and techniques to fix those implants in the body past a certain age it’s getting hard to find someone without some kind of implant knee kind of screws in their spine and so we’ve got this problem pretty well solved to answer your question yes the body is trying to get rid of any implant but we can ensure that basically can it’s also worth highlighting that the threads have not actually moved in the past 5 months there’s some still minor movements in terms of some maybe getting pushed in a little bit pushed out a little bit but it’s more or less very stable and stable for and the reason for that is you know once you do a brain surgery it takes some time for the tissues to come in and then you know the heart tissue or the neom membrane to actually come in and then anchor the threads in place and once that happens has been stable and seeing much movement that’s where the world record performance starts to come in yeah that was couple weeks ago yeah the threads it is important that the threads be extremely tiny if they’re extremely tiny then the the brain does not the smaller they are the less likely the brain is to react to to them that’s why you want the threads to be extremely tiny and also to minimize any damage to neurons on that not we we do plan to actually share some of the tissue response in detail in some of the later upcoming updates yeah it is quite a challenging it’s challenging on many fronts to do something like this because you’re trying to read read and write electrical signals but you need to have the threads themselves need to be electrically isolated and not subject to corrosion in the body so like the just metal by itself is so much sub to corrosion or or being attacked so it’s like in terms of the various Coatings and things to actually make this electrode work while not actually eroding its performance over time is is very difficult human body is a very harsh environment very har environment it’s it’s a bag of salt water with bass sensors that’s elevated temperature that is well regulated I’m sure people have experienced dropping their electronic devices in a seawater and in an instant so we we’re going to wrap this up soon there’s like a few last questions yes so a good question so what about upgrades so yeah we do think it’s going to be important to be able to upgrade the device over time just like you wouldn’t want like an iPhone one stuck in your brain forever if you’ve got an iPhone 15 you probably want the iPhone 15 not the iPhone 1 so I think people over time will be able to upgrade their new link so we’ll take the neur link device out and put a new one in and we have done this with some of our animals and they’ve actually in one case we did it with we we upgrade our device three times and with a pig we did with a monkey as well he’s able to do BCI yeah he’s doing fine yeah has imp actually hit his I think his record the last with the with an upgrade but still beat him though still beat him yes this is true humans are top of the species leader board right now pag is like what like eight or something p is like 8.5 BPS okay well that’s a very high score I’m not trying to put patri down and also to train a monkey to do that it’s like a whole Challenge on its own we have the best animal care team yeah I just do want to emphasize we do our absolute best to take care of the the animals and when we had the USDA inspector come through she said that this was the the nicest Animal Facility she’s ever seen in her entire life breakfast on an app the monkey orders room service I’m not kid we have monkey room service which is rare we’re the only ones who offer monkey room service we really do everything we can to maximize the welfare of the animals all right with that thank you everyone for tuning in I hope you found this interesting