A simple explanation of Neuralink and its benefits

Most of us know that Neuralink is the brain child of Elon Musk. Trust this man to come up with something ingenious, and ground-breaking!

This technology aims to help people with brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, or brain diseases. Such individuals have some form of disability because of a disconnection between their brain and their body. Neuralink aims to fix that. 

For example, with Neuralink, people will be able to control robotic arms with their mind. Or, it aims to help those with Alzheimer’s disease by restoring those lost neural networks. 

What is a Brain Machine Interface (BMI)?

The BMI is the crux of Neuralink. Like the name suggests, it’s an interface between our brain and the machine we want to control with our mind. This interface is made of tiny electrodes that are implanted in the brain. The Neuralink BMI consists of almost 3,072 tiny electrodes placed throughout the brain. 

The nerves in our body actually communicate using tiny currents. Signals from one neuron to the other are sent by transferring Sodium and Potassium ions across the cell membrane. This communication link can be broken if neurons are damaged. Nerves are no longer able to send signals to each other, which means we can’t send signals to our body anymore. 

Imagine if someone had a spinal cord injury. Those nerves in their back would be broken. Which means the brain can’t tell the legs to walk or the arms to lift anymore. 

Now electrodes are made to detect current. The idea behind the BMI is to plant electrodes small enough to detect the signals sent to each tiny neuron in our brain, and interpret them on a machine.

The BMI is also able to send signals to the neurons in the language they speak, thus completing the communication link. 

You can thus think of a BMI as a way to patch up broken connections in neural networks.

Why is the Neuralink technology so hard to create?

First off, we’re talking about implanting electrodes in specific regions of a person’s brain while they are alive. Second, the number of electrodes has to be large enough to increase the accuracy and amount of data transferred via the interface. But a large number of electrodes poses the difficulty of a bulky system, which is difficult or almost impossible to implant in someone’s brain. So what do you do? Reduce the size of the electrodes to as small as possible.

From what I understand about the structure of this BMI, the whole thing is made of threads. These threads are made of the biocompatible material polyimide. The thread comes with an electrode, and a sensor to communicate with a chip they made specially for this. 

The amazing thing about these threads is that they are around 5um in diameter. A strand of hair, in comparison, is 100um wide. 

Now you can imagine how something so small and fragile is difficult to surgically implant. So, to circumvent this, they made a surgical robot with high precision and accuracy that will implant these threads in the right places of the brain while making sure they don’t hurt other important areas. 

Here is an image showing the robot inserting threads into a fake brain- SO COOL

This is where I got the above image from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6914248/figure/figure3/

(Elon Musk has authored that article by the way)

This sounds like its straight out of a sci-fi movie, doesn’t it? Wait till you hear about its implications!

How is Neuralink going to help us?

It aims to:

• Restore motor function in quadriplegic patients.

• Cure epilepsy and prevent seizures from happening.

• Control speech synthesizers with their mind so that people who have lost the ability to speak can do so.

• Allow paralysed individuals to control things like their wheelchair/ computer mouse with their mind.

• And so much more. The potential is limitless!

Can Neuralink be misused?

Unfortunately, of course. Anything that is good, if misused, can turn into something bad. In this particular scenario, if the technology develops such that commands can be sent to the brain easily… and if someone bad decides to send harmful commands…

Well you can picture the rest!

Also, at the moment, Neuralink is in the bad press for allegedly killing over 1000 animals during some experiments that were not done safely, and were rushed. This is sad to hear.

This technology is far from ready to be rolled out into the world in its full form. However, it is revolutionary. It’s great to be alive at a time when our sci-fi movies are actually becoming real life, right in front of us!

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Also, an article that I absolutely loved that taught me about Neuralink is here: Read this for a more in-depth explanation of Neuralink

Happy Reading :)