How does Neuralink plan to put a chip in your brain!
Neuralink is a startup by Elon Musk which is working on brain-machine interface technology that allows humans to interact with machines using their minds. It’s like having a supercomputer placed in your brain through surgery. This device will make it possible for you to connect and control machines and help you come up with solutions to many medical conditions. With Neuralink, we could further study electrical signals from our brain.
Understanding how Neuralink works
If you have watched the blockbuster movie, Matrix, here’s a scene to recall. Remember the scene in which Neo (Keanu Reaves) learns martial arts by simply downloading a computer program into his mind? Neuralink may not be able to teach us martial arts, but it will let us control machines by sending and receiving electrical signals through the brain.
To understand how Neuralink works, you must first understand that our brain uses neurons to relay information to various regions of the body; these neurons in your brain join to form a huge network and communicate using chemical signals. During this, an electric field is created and we can record it by placing electrodes near it. By doing so, the electrodes will simply convert our brain’s signals into something a machine can understand.
Neuralink will be able to read our thoughts and develop a way for us to communicate with machines without even opening our mouths in this way. Neuralink uses a 4 mm N1 square chip that is placed in your skull. This chip has many wires attached to it, each as thin as the human hair. These threads help reach out to the brain and are wired only close to the important parts. With the help of these threads, messages can be transferred between the neurons.
Did you know the N1 chip can be connected to a thousand different cells of the brain? This way, a patient can even have about 10 N1 chips placed in their skull. The N1 chip’s purpose is to capture and stimulate electrical spikes in our brain.
The future applications of Neuralink
In the future, Neuralink will be able to capture and playback memories, as well as save them to an external disc and download them into a robot body, according to Elon Musk. People with implants, he suggested, will be able to telepathize, not just send and receive words, but genuine concepts and images as well. The Neuralink technology can possibly help people who suffer from neurological disorders and spinal nerve injuries.
Here are a few applications of Neuralink in the coming years:
- Neuralink will be able to help people with visual paralysis see again. It will do so by stimulating a bunch of electrodes to recreate images and thus, give people supervision.
- People will be able to use telepathy to communicate their thoughts. Normally, a lot of data is lost while we try to communicate our thoughts by speaking. With Neuralink, we could just share our thoughts directly without even saying anything.
- Neuralink will help with eliminating pain and providing many solutions to medical conditions.
- The device has a huge potential to solve mental illness. We could most likely lower the chances of anxiety, depression, or even solve them.
- We wouldn’t feel nostalgic anymore because, with Neuralink, people can download or rewind their memories just like you are downloading a movie/song.
- With Neuralink implanted in your brain, people can unlock hidden creativity. For example, it’s nearly impossible to recreate a scene in your head and try to paint it. By having electrodes placed at the right spots, this creativity can be shared with others like a preview or a 3D model.
Final Thoughts
Elon Musk’s Neuralink has a primary purpose to link the human brain to the digital world wirelessly. This will allow people to keep up with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Want to tap deeper into Neuralink’s capabilities? We present to you an opportunity to interact with an ex-core team member of Neuralink who is currently also an assistant Chemistry professor at IIT Bombay.
Mr. Srinivasan has studied in prestigious universities such as IIT Madras, Stanford, and Berkeley. He was also the head of electrochemistry at Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s successful startups that is coming up with devices to possibly connect our brain with that of a machine.
Mr. Srinivasan will be discussing his journey in the field of science, research, and technology while also shedding some light on the exciting future of brain-machine interfaces and sharing his advice with you.
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