Three weeks ago, Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink introduced a neuroimplant into the brain of the first person. As it has now become known, healing after the operation was successful, the patient has already begun to use the capabilities of the implant.
Elon Musk announced back in February 2021 the successful implantation of a wireless neural interface in a monkey. Now, it comes to human experiments. Despite the fuss surrounding any of Musk’s announcements, he is far from the first to implant an implant inside the human brain. Over the past 30 years, the clinical application of neuroimplants has come a long way.
Back in 1998, neuroscientist Philip Kennedy introduced an invasive neural interface containing nerve growth factors to artist and musician Johnny Ray, who lost the ability to move after a stroke. Ray had already learned to control the cursor on the screen by imagining hand movements.
In 2004, paralyzed American Matthew Nagle became the first person to have a BrainGate implant implanted in his brain. Neil first learned to move the cursor on a computer by imagining that he was moving his hands, then turned on the TV using an implant, changed channels, and finally even learned to control a robotic arm – pick up and hold objects. In 2016, scientists from Johns Hopkins University introduced an implant of 128 electrodes that allowed subjects to control individual fingers on a prosthetic hand with very high accuracy, up to 96.5%.
So, Neuralink has yet to make a breakthrough. One of the main achievements of the technology proposed by Elon Musk is that the interface is wireless and compact. The implant consists of flexible and thin polymer threads as electrodes implanted by a neurosurgical robot, and the chip has powerful small amplifiers for signal transmission.
However, Musk’s company’s researchers still have to solve several problems that everyone working on neuroimplantation has encountered before. This is biocompatibility and safety.
Electrodes built into the brain record the signal well for the first few weeks, and then the immune response and encapsulation of the electrodes occur, so over time, the signal quality drops significantly. And no one can guarantee that in 5-10 years, no unforeseen circumstances will happen to a foreign object built into the brain.
Because Neuralink is a private, for-profit company, its representatives are very reluctant to publish specific data about their research – mostly only tweets and press releases. Therefore, it remains to be seen how far Elon Musk’s company has progressed in resolving these issues. In any case, people won’t get implants in their brains for the foreseeable future, except in rare medical cases.
Nevertheless, progress in this area is obvious: biocompatible materials and new signal-processing technologies are emerging, and the number of recorded neurons continues to grow. For example, according to the calculations of the German neuroscientist Konrad Cording, an analog of Moore’s law for neural interfaces would sound like this: the number of recorded neurons doubles every 7.4 years.
In this case, in 15-30 years, we should expect the emergence of full-fledged and affordable neuroprosthetic technologies, and Neuralink has every chance to be one of the pioneers.
