Neuralink: The future of Brain-Computer Interfaces

Umar Ahmed
Nov 7 · 12 min read
The charismatic Elon Musk is back at it again, with his mind-expanding Startup: Neuralink

You know the metaphor, “human calculator?”

In a few decades, this will no longer be a metaphor, but a reality.

Humans will be able to compute complex mathematical equations inside their heads and this is just scratching the beginning of this technology… there is so much potential.

Introducing Elon Musk!

Elon Musk, the charismatic entrepreneur who started Tesla and SpaceX has set his mind on joining the world of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). With his new startup, Neuralink he plans to bring a technological revolution upon us.

When you hear of Brain-Computer Interface, the technology sounds completely out of this world.

The truth is BCIs exists today but in a very basic form — and you’re most probably using it right now.

It is your mouse and keyboard.

These devices allow humans to communicate with our computers through our hands and fingers. Our brain sends electrical impulses through our nervous system to make our fingers move, which THEN begins to type on a keyboard. The computer then translates each keystroke as a byte which consists of 0’s and 1’s which the computer can THEN interpret. There’s A LOT going on. Although, you may think it’s an efficient system, why would you settle for less when you can settle for greater?

The Neuralink Plan:

Stage 1: Help those out who are affected by brain and spinal cord damage.

Stage 2: Preserve and enhance the brains of individuals

Stage 3: Introduce the next phase of human evolution through the symbiosis of Humans (Homo Sapiens) and Artificial Intelligence.

Forget using computers through your hands…

We’re gonna interface with computers straight from our brains.

You might be wondering what a Brain-Computer Interface is…

So… What The HECK is a BCI!

A Brain-Computer Interface or BCI for short is quite simply, a computerized device that analyzes, processes and interacts with the human brain based on the outputted electrical signals. It’s not a laptop or desktop, this computer will directly interface to your brain.

All types of BCI’s record and analyze the electrical activity in your brain, but there are three different types of BCI’s that are used in the industry:

Non-Invasive: This generally uses a device such as an Electroencephalography (EEG). An EEG can be a helmet or a cap fitted on a person’s head and is fitted with nodes called electrodes. These electrodes record the electromagnetic waves your brain produces. It is non-invasive because no surgery is required. EEGs are used to diagnose epilepsy, sleep problems and more.

Semi-Invasive: Surgery is required for this method and a device called electrocorticography(ECoG). An ECoG has electrodes that are placed on the surface of your brain. This allows for much more precise readings of the brain due to the fact that the cerebral cortex is much more accessible. You can treats illnesses such as epilepsy with technology as the electrodes can electrically stimulate certain parts of the brain to return a positive response.

Invasive: This method also requires surgery and is implanted directly inside your brain. The electrodes are placed directly inside of your brain and interact with individual neurons. There is a lot of potential with this specific type of BCI as brainwaves are in the more precise and purest form and stimulation of the brain is easily accessible. Currently, this is only being used on blind and paralyzed people as the procedure has many risks to it. Neuralink is an invasive BCI, but they have planned to revolutionize the surgery process to minimize risks.

An invasive array of electrodes that record individual neurons

There are four main processes in a BCI that allow it to work:

  • Signal Aquisition: This is the process where electromagnetic waves produced by electrical activity in the brain, are recorded by the use of electrodes in the BCI.
  • Signal Processing: The waves outputted by the brain are quite weak and there is a lot of interfering noise in it. Specialized algorithms analyze the recorded waves in order to produce a clear and high quality version.
  • Decoding and Encoding: AI is utilized to once again analyze the wave data. It uses machine learning to identify specific brain patterns from the data. (Such as, “The taste cortex is being stimulated”)
  • Control and Feedback: The BCI should take upon an action after interpreting the wave data. Whether it’s to electrically stimulate the brain to stop a seizure from occurring due to specific brain patterns or sending data to your phone about your sleep habits. This is the phase where the results of the BCI is shown.

The wonders of the brain

There is one key cell in the brain that defines its function and this is the neuron!

A neuron is the building block of the brain and the direct connection between the biological and computational aspects of BCIs.

…What does a neuron do?

Neurons are specialized cells in your brain that transmit information throughout your brain and body in the form of electrical impulses. It’s similar to telephone lines which transmit calls through them. In this case, electrical and chemical impulses.

Everything we experience in our life is a brain experience. All thoughts, emotions, and actions are the firing of neurons through electrical signals in our brain.

Neurons are interconnected and send electrical impulses to talk to each other!

There are approximately 86 billion neurons in the brain. Each neuron can form 1000+ connections between other neurons leading up to…. 100 TRILLION connections. This all makes you, YOU!

Action Potential: The key to BCI’s

An action potential is the term described when a neuron has accumulated enough stimulus to fire and transport electrical signals between other neurons.

Action Potential is a fundamental part of the unison of computers and the brain.

scan of brainwaves using an EEG

This graph is a recording of the brainwaves produced by electrical activity in a brain. Specifically, those that take place during an action potential in the brain produces an electromagnetic wave that can be read by an EEG machine.

Looking at one specific wave from the graph, we can see that there are dips or spikes which are quite visible. Each spike is an action potential.

This is quite literally a group of neurons exporting electrical signals to other neurons.

^^This line above is the premise of how all Brain-Computer Interfaces are being imagined to functions.

It’s at these action potentials, or spikes, which a BCI will detect and read it to make a decision or computation in real-time based on the spike.

For example:

The act to move a leg is a set of electrical responses in your brain which then leads a signal down your spinal cord to stimulate muscle movement in your leg. If someone were to have a broken spine, the signal from their brain would not be able to reach your leg leaving you paralyzed.

If we gave a quadriplegic a bionic leg and connected it to Neuralink, it would function through action potentials generated by neural activity in the brain. Every time that person would want to move their leg, the action potential would fire in their brain, but this time, an electrode through the BCI would read the specific brainwave, digitize it, and send the information wirelessly to the bionic leg. You could theoretically wirelessly send the impulses from your brain to make your leg move. This completely bypasses the spine and it happens in real-time.

Not only can action potentials be read, but they can also be artificially stimulated in the brain in order to engage a particular sensation in the human body directly through the BCI. The potential for this is unlimited!

Just being able to move your leg is cool, but this doesn’t bring back the sense of touch and pressure to it. This is an essential feeling for humans. There is a solution, and it’s through artificial action potentials. If there were a multitude of sensors on the bionic leg which were able to detect pressure and touch, it could relay this information to the BCI.

Special parts of the brain are designated for touch. If you stimulate specific parts of the somatosensory cortex in your brain you would feel touch. The BCI through an electrode would stimulate an electrical pulse to a specific part of this cortex which should then create an artificial action potential. In this case, we have artificially created the feeling of touch and pressure in our bionic leg.

This is one specific application of BCI’s, and in fact, this is the first phase of Neuralink, in which they would like to help people that areparaplegic. Elon Musk expects human trials to begin in 2020 starting on restoring movement in a person that is paraplegic.

What’s Neuralink all about?

Elon Musk started Neuralink in 2016 and has invested approx. 100 million dollars.

Musk states that the human brain has two layers:

  • The limbic system where emotions and needs are processed
  • The cortex where thinking and planning takes place

Neuralink in this case, will act as a third layer on top of these. A digital augmentation layer that will use computers to combine with our brain in order to achieve heightened… well heightened everything!

The microchip Neuralink as design to process all this is called the N1 chip and it’s 4mm by 6mm.

The N1 Chip

There are tiny electrodes in the form of threads off the N1 chip which are directly implanted into your brain.

They are thinner than human hair and interact directly with neurons so that they can create an interface between the computer and the brain.

The N1 chip can read what neurons are doing through these thread-like electrodes, but also fire on their own accord!

How do you put it in my brain??

Designing a chip is all fine and dandy, but HOW do you get it on someone’s brain?

A lot of people may have concerns at the thought

DO I HAVE TO CUT MY HEAD OPEN??

ARE THEY GONNA DRAG CABLES THROUGH MY EYES??

Don’t worry, this isn’t how you’ll spend your life

No. Don’t worry. Elon and his team didn’t just leave it at designing a chip and calling it a day, but they also created an efficient, safe and effective way to install the Neurallink components inside your skull.

Trained surgeons will instead carefully drill four very small holes into your head where a specialized robotic machine will then precisely inject the electrode threads on your brain and then the holes in your skulls are patched with the actual N1 chips. Each group of threads connected to an N1 would contain around 3,072 electrodes, which would be spread across 96 threads. (You could fit 10 N1 chips in your skull to maximize the power!)

Humans are not able to perform surgeries at the “nanoscale”

The specialized robot will connect threads to specific locations of your brain with the utmost care and laser precision. It’s programmed to avoid blood vessels and other vital components in the brain to reduce the chance of internal bleeding.

Finally, they make a small incision behind your ear where all threads and N1 chips connect to a receiver.

This device receives all the processed information from the implanted components and then relays it to the only out-of-body component: The Link.

This device is called The Link, because it is literally The Link between the outside and your implant. It’s through The Link where you can install software updates or execute commands the implant should do.

Neuralink would show up as a Bluetooth device. It would be able to connect to your phone, tablet, or computer. You could control the keys and mouse with your brain.

The Link is just simply charged by a USB-C cable while all the internal components take such low power, that they can be powered by the electrical signals from your brain. Anytime you disconnect The Link from the receiver behind your ear, all components are temporarily disabled until you reconnect it.

The design is very simple. When you hear BCI…

Thanks to Neuralink team you won’t have to look like this

Big clunky devices and a bunch of cables coming from your head are not what you have to succumb to.

Look how eloquent!

Instead, Neuralink has a very elegant and effective design process.

Electrodes and N1

The Neuralink will use its electrodes to communicate with neurons in the brain. Every time an action potential occurs, it produces a wave that the electrodes pick up. N1 converts the analog brain waves into binary, 1’s and 0’s. This occurs because the computer is then able to interpret this binary information. Just like how computers utilize 1’s and 0’s, on and off, the brain works in a similar way: On or off. Electrical impulse or no impulse.

The electrodes have to be within a 60-nanometer radius away from a neuron in order to send and receive information between both parties.

The N1 chip reads analog brain signals, amplifies them (This has to be done at the moment, in order to reduce noise from surrounding frequencies), digitizes them (converted to binary), processes them and is sent to The Link.

The most exciting part is how the Neuralink is able to induce neurons to create an artificial action potential. This can have many applications in the future. This would be the basis of downloading information directly to your brain. MindblOWN!

Applications

In the testing periods, Neuralink was installed in a monkey where the primate was literally able to control software on a computer with its brain.

Elon wants to begin trials on humans and he believes it will be possible by the end of 2020. The biggest hurdle for a BCI startup is getting FDA approval to experiment on humans.

The first few trials would be to help people with various types of brain or spine-related disabilities. Theoretically, if you had a microphone or camera and fed the raw data to the N1 chip (obviously with the right software to process these inputs), it could convert the raw digital and audio signals. It would then utilize the electrodes to stimulate the neurons associated with seeing and hearing, in a specific pattern in which the person would be able to experience these senses through an external device.

After providing support for those who need it in the general population, Elon has more plans for Neuralink.

He acknowledges Artifical Intelligence as an existential threat looming over humanity.

So… when you can’t beat em, join em!

What would Human X AI mean for the world

Elon believes that humans should attain symbiosis with AI and through this Human X AI will be birthed. The results of this cannot be comprehended as of now, but this is Elon’s final goal for Neuralink.

He still has many useful and insightful uses for this product in our society.

Elon wants Neuralink to be something people can live with. It can significantly improve the quality of life for people with disabilities, chronic conditions, or injuries. . Being able to control a computer and make decisions independently could restore a sense of control, independence, and dignity to their lives of people with disabilities.

Future cases

People will also want to use it as a layer of superhuman intelligence. It takes the N1 chip 900 nanoseconds to do a computation which is faster than your actual brain. You could access vast amounts of data almost instantly straight through your brain.

If multiple people had BCI’s, you could communicate basically by telepathy! This communication between individuals would be so rich. Not only could you transmit words to one another, but you could also transmit your words with emotions and the abstract feelings that follow.

Meaning would not be lost in translation

This type of non-verbal communication could become essential in the future as people’s thoughts and beliefs slowly drift apart.

Key Takeaways

  • BCIs are an exponential technology that has the ability to completely revolutionize the way humans interact with technology
  • Elon Musk is at the forefront with his startup: Neuralink
  • Action potentials are the key features in the brain that allows communication with a computer
  • Neuralink is a profound piece of technology and has an effective installation process.
  • BCIs will allow humans to think in unimaginable ways.

Action Item:

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Umar Ahmed

Written by

Innovator at TKS (The Knowledge Society)

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