Neuralink Live Update - July 2024

right welcome I hope this is working uh welcome to neurolink live update uh we're going to tell you about uh the progress of the first patient with neurolink umand and uh sort of do a recap of of the progress there uh then talk about what uh changes we were're making for the second patient which we're um uh hoping to to do an implant in the next week or so um and this is for our first product which is called tathy which enables you to control a computer or phone just by thinking so let's uh in

fact so so we'll start off with just some introductions DJ want to start hi everyone my name is DJ H I'm an electrical engineer and a chip designer by training uh I led the design of first several generations of the neuralink implant um 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 uh yeah go ahead yeah head of brain interfaces applications and I'm Bliss I'm a software engineer at nink trying to figure out how to turn brain activity into cool stuff

in the world all right thank you well let's see so we'll just get going into the presentation so our first product is something I said we call telepathy which is enables uh the uh person with a neuralink implant to control their phone or computer just by thinking um and once you can control your phone or computer you can essentially control almost anything uh just and literally just by thinking so there's no uh eye tracking or anything it is purely uh purely your thoughts uh so uh this is a like really qu quite a profound uh

device that can help a lot of people who have lost uh the connection between their the brain and body so U you imagine people like uh Steph hulking who uh you know imagine if he if he could communicate at the same speed as someone who had still had the connection to the brain and body um so it's it's really uh something that can help millions of people around the world and it's a it's part of our our overall goal of enabling a very high bandwidth connection between the the brain and uh and your and the

rest of the world and your computers um the long-term goal which sounds little esoteric is to at the uh the risk of of uh the civiliz civilizational risk of AI uh by having a a sort of closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence but uh but that that that'll take many years uh along the way we're we're going to help solve a lot of uh brain injury or spinal injury issues U so U and without first product telepathy that's that's going to be really quite profound uh that there is also potential longterm for uh

Bridging the the the Gap so if there are damaged or severed neurons being able to to expand the gap between the brain's motor cortex to the spine to enable someone to uh use their body again I think that would be very exciting um and it's you know that that is something that is possible in long term um and they're not our second product which we've demonstrated to work with the monkeys is uh Blindside which would enable someone who is completely blind or lost both eyes or completely lost uh their optic nerve uh to be able

to see so that's uh that's something that we hope to demonstrate in the future so this just gives you a sense of what the device is uh a way to think about the ne device is kind of like a a Fitbit or an Apple Watch with with tiny wires or electrodes those those tiny wires are implanted in the in the brain and they uh read and write electrical signals so uh a lot of people think the brain is this incredibly mysterious thing it's it it is mysterious in a lot of ways but but it is

actually U it does operate with electrical signals so if you can read and write those electrical signals uh you can interface with the brain and um the the device is is sized so so that it is the same size as the as the piece of scull that is removed so if it's like a few centimeters diameter of SK skull that's removed we replace that with the device uh after implanting the the tiny wires with the surgical robot and that enables uh read R capability to the neurons completely wirelessly yeah yes exactly um it's completely wirelessly

so like I could I could have a neural link right now you wouldn't know um and it it charges inductively so you could just uh basically have a electromagnetic pad that that that you charge the device with so yeah it's like an Apple Watch exactly so uh except that it's actually a much harder technical uh challenge to solve given that there's limit as to how much eat the brain tissue whereas in for phones and you don't actually really care if it's sitting on a table sure uh yeah it's Al it's got to go through skin

and stuff as well in our case so it's it is a tougher challenge to to charge and to uh have high band with Communications given that it's got to go through uh skin and hair and stuff we have solved it but we have solved it yeah so yeah yeah so our first step with the telepathy is basically to unlock a digital Independence for people uh with paralyses and to allow them control the computer just with their mind without moving their body and uh 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 uh the level of control I have it's not a high bar for you actually just to be clear this guy he's controlling this with his brain so he's not like you can't see his hands in this video but he's not using a mouse and keyboard just you know thinking about how to move the cursor and playing civilization no ey tracker right there's no ey tracking from he's liveing like you watch this on Twitter just thinking that's it just thinking this just a couple days

cursor move here yeah yeah yeah this like last night or two nights ago something yes yeah I think I think the way he also described it is he's using the yeah he has many more videos on his uh yeah on the platform definitely check them out um yeah so he can he's streaming that live and also can talk and like move his head without problem mul yeah you also like if you join this live stream you can ask him questions he'll he'll tell you all about what it's like to move also I think U I

haven't played civilization myself um but I think this is actually not easy mode this is expert this Emperor mode Emperor mode if you have played s Emperor mode is like the highest difficulty level just the point is like this is a ctively demanding task while live streaming playing the hardest mode of the game and uh he's able to do that while moving talking engaging with uh you know the audience while playing one of the other games he likes to play a lot is chess and 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 about our device is that you can use it anywhere anytime also on a plane during a flight while uh creating really cool memes of c um also our device unlocks things that previously were impossible for our participant for example uh we're able to connect him to his gaming console switch and play Mario Kart with friends and family and it was lovely to see them playing together

after years uh that he couldn't do it since he's injured imine if you're sitting one ra over from this guy on the plane look over he's making a cat M No Hands no movement live in a world world yeah it's strange strange time yeah and uh he loves using the device and using independently daily to watch videos uh read uh play games uh using the browser and the key metrics that we care is to make sure our device is actually useful is to is basically the amount of hours we use the device daily and weekly

and we track it uh weekly since the since the surgery and on weeks that he's not too busy and not traveling he can even reach 70 hours uh of using the device is a week and this is amazing um he would of course love to use it more but need to run resarch sessions uh 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 MacBook he's controlling this isn't

like some limited edition thing where there's only a few options like he 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 turn control he was able to break the previous world record for cursor control just by uh uh using the brain and recently he even doubled it and was able to uh 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 well you can do it you can do it on our website and it's very uh addictive games yeah it's a very simple game you just have to click on the Square but uh but it's it's it's it's 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 so I I

mean 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 that you will find that's actually quite difficult to do so um and this is really with version one of the device and with only a small percentage of the uh electrodes uh that that are working so this is uh this is really just the beginning but even the beginning is twice as good as the world record this is important to emphasize um the you know the media has a habit

of of uh saying that the glass is 10% empty uh but but actually it's 90% full so uh I think it's really quite an accomplishment of the nuring team to um have achieved with ver with the first patient the first device uh uh twice the world record for the uh brain to computer uh bandwidth that's a really an astonishing an amazingly great outcome um and it's only going to be get better from here so the potential is to ultimately get I think to megabit level um so that's that's part the long-term goal of of improving

the the bandwidth of the 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 I say less than one bit per second over the course of a day so if there are 86,400 seconds in a day uh you're outputting less than um that number of bits to any any given device except in perhaps very rare circumstances so uh the this is um actually quite important for um for AI you know basically for for human uh AI symbiosis is just

being able to communicate at a at a speed the AI can follow so yeah just to emphasize again he's performing at this extremely high level with about 15% of his channels functional um and so we want to mitigate any of the problems that led to that situation so you know the brain is a fascinating organ uh 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 um that's because neurosurgeons like to have as much room as possible around the brain

and so uh there's this little known control mechanism of allowing the CO2 concentration in the blood to rise a bit uh which allows the brain to either expand or contract depending on where you target that CO2 so 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 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 the first participant that air pocket

we think may have contributed to eating up some of the thread slack uh as 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 uh 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 um you know oddl looking shape the folds of the brain travel down deep into the brain

and and along with it Go those onion 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 were most interested in avoiding them entirely uh to avoid that possibility we're going to insert uh in our future participants more close to the middle of the apex of the folds uh ensuring that we're crossing the layers of Interest layer five of the CeX I also think that it's

important to um highlight here those tiny wires that Elon mentioned uh they're they're fraction of a human hair they're very flexible uh intentionally so because you know brains constantly moving and you want the electrodes to be moving with the brain causing less of the scarring and um it's it's actually impossible uh for a human neurosurgeon how however talented Matthew is to actually maneuver them by so 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 vasculature so

that you don't disrupt um the the and and cause immune response from happening so uh we we actually have the technology to be able to place them exactly where we want them in 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 um is really quite an achievement yes so something that probably most people don't realize is that the the brain appears to be sort of somewhat undifferentiated so if you look at the cortex it

looks like a whole bunch of folds that were you know maybe like it's it's it's not obvious just looking at a say a picture of the brain that uh that that it's the brain is highly differentiated that there's you you you pretty much know exactly where the part of the brain is that uh controls your right hand and your left hand and your leg and that that kind of thing or or Vision it's it's actually U quite precisely located it's not uh some people like might might think look at the brain like oh could be

could be anywhere but but actually we it it's it's your brain is is highly differentiated even though it doesn't look it's yeah do you want to describe how we actually we like how we identify where the drill the yeah so we can we can put a patient that is considering this implant uh into an fmri so a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and ask them to imagine hand movements that you know 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 and so we have a pretty good idea based in in fact for each individual participant which part of their brain is going to um you know respond to imagined movements of the hand and so we can map those imagine movements much as we all do uh 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 kind of an important point that like 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 um extremely common across people Precision is key too yeah um the left-handed right-handed my mind too like if you're right-handed you want the device on the left side yeah lateral side to the hand that's your dominant yeah the left side of your brain controls right side of your body yeah everything's CR yeah another of the risk mitigations we're looking at in the future yeah is that you know that the implant has a certain size the

depth of the bottom of the implant is actually thinner than the average human skull and so what we want to be able to do is control the size of the Gap under the implant give the threads that travel from the implant into the brain as much slack as possible uh we didn't do this in the first uh participant because we didn't want to you know manipulate any of their issue that we didn't absolutely have to in upcoming implants our plan is to of sculpt the surface of the skull uh very intentionally to minimize the Gap

under the implant such that the bottom of the implant 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 brain and we actually built a tool to do right yeah this this is actually this is a very important detail uh you really want the the inner Contour of the skull to be flush so the implant there's there's no the brain

doesn't want to Puck her up into the into the Gap that's really quite a big deal so like like minimizing the air pocket um and the implant being flushed with the the the inside Contour of the skull is are two very important uh improvements the additional benefit here is that uh you know you do see some amount of stick up what we call stick up so you minor bump in the head but this actually eliminates it even further yeah yeah I mean it's like really our goal is that that if you run your hand over

the top of the skull you don't feel any any bump you don't feel any any device um and that even if someone was bold you wouldn't really even notice it um and uh and then from the the in inner cont of the skull that the the brain from a physical standpoint doesn't really notice that there's a divot in the skull mhm because there's no divot okay another aspect of uh of the human brain that you know obviously differs from any of the animals that we tested in uh is that the human brain is a lot

bigger and so you may not realize that that means the the human brain moves quite a bit more uh than uh any of these other smaller brained creatures and so when we open the skull uh we see the brain travel toward and away from the robot about 3 millimeters in total as the heart beats and and the breathing takes place and so that movement uh you know it it adds a small challenge for the robot uh in precisely choosing a depth to insert each thread it's not an enormous Challenge and we've already upgraded the robot

capabilities to be able to even more precisely Target depth in in even a very rapidly moving brain uh 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 uh and so we're going to uh broaden the range of depths at which we insert threads so you know 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 uh the crossing of

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 um 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 um from from each thread and so we're going to you know 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 uh neural interface devices offer most neural interface devices are kind of a static fixed rigid array that you push in and all the electrodes are at one depth right 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 looks crazy that that that is yeah just

with a with a Pneumatic Hammer that's the that's this is it sounds somewhat barbaric this is not what we do but this is the what's been done before is literally just hammering in what looks like a better Nails into the brain which actually works it's astonishing that it actually works but I mean some people like manually like DBS probes you're just sticking in by hand search is just guiding them in those are several several orders of magnitude more volume of brain tissue that you're destroying compared to what we're doing but that deep brain simulation stuff

does actually work it actually helps people a lot Yeahs of thousand yeah yeah that's a great product yeah but I mean I think we'll we'll be able to do um a much more finessed version of that down the road um so uh I mean it's really difficult like the the the neuralink device is something that really absolutely minimizes damage to the brain absolutely minimizes the load on the patient um and the goal is to allow someone to live a completely normal life um they they you won't even notice that someone even has the device um

so like I said restoring the 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 in fact you could you could allow people to see kind of like dordy Le Forge in Star Trek in any what whatever infrared yeah infrared ultraviolet um radar um so so 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 MH and and I also think you know 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 placing in the brain next to the source which neuron as close to it as possible otherwise what you get is you get a population response and not be able to

kind of do the level of controls that we believe of yeah I mean May uh a good sort of analogy would be like if you're trying to understand what goes on in a factory you kind of need to go into the factory you can't just put a stethoscope on the wall um and try to figure out what's going like anything on the outside of the the trying to read things from the outside is like put 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 be in you got to be threads are got to be in there um so um but I just want to be emphasize again like the goal is to give people people superpowers um not not just to restore prior functionality so I that's very exciting um 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 uh the technology is going to give them superpowers I mean that's that's amazing so yeah I guess these off yeah could can you multitask

with it yeah in fact if you look at Nolan's streaming and you can just uh check out Nolan streams on on the xplatform um he's multitasking all the time so he's playing video games while talking and uh listening to podcasts listening to podcast yeah yeah exactly so uh it's it's really just like if you you're using your hands and you you you can be you know playing a video game while talking so I mean don't take a word for it there just go watch I mean yeah he's out there on the internet doing his thing

yeah yeah exactly uh so can you do keyboard shortcuts or is it just the mouse yeah that's actually what we're working on right now oh sure So currently he's walking the mouse but we are also exploring recording more Dimensions out from the new activity multiple clicks uh so to do shortcuts or just able to control more games like control Co games with an Xbox controller uh but also in the future we expect we plan to expand to decode uh text not just the mouse control but also allow our participant to type much faster and yeah

yeah actually so maybe uh going back to the discussion of thread retraction you know 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 control because in the motorex neurons don't all represent the same thing so if you're trying to understand like uh you know what an individual finger trying to do uh 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 know representation or decodability of all fingers on the hand and 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 you know just say I love you to them to a loved one in their family or ask for a glass of water or a scratch or whatever you know being able to type it a fast R it's extremely important and the more fingers

you have access to higher probability you can do that efficiently and so yeah you know I'm super excited about high how high the ceiling is we can uh that we can get to as we resolve this dat retraction issue yeah I mean we're C we're currently at approximately 10 10 bits per second uh PE great but uh ultimately we want to get to a megabit uh and I think say ultimately whole brain interface I think you know many years from now I think gigabit level is possible um so that's uh that's pretty astonishing um now

you know with there's a still version one about device as we mentioned it's version one with only 15% of the threads working U the current device has uh 64 threads with 16 electrodes on each thread um our next device has 128 threads with with eight electrodes per per thread um because as we get more confident about how where exactly to place the uh the electro the thread you you need fewer electrodes per thread so we can essentially with the current Dev without substantial changes I potentially double the bandwidth if if we are accurate with with

the placement of of the threads um and then our next Generation device will have maybe even more channels yeah yeah of year yeah so our next device we aiming for yeah uh 3,000 channels uh so this will just keep getting better and better uh really moving up I think in or magnitude in factors of 10 basically and what kind of bandwidth so I think won't be it won't be all that long before uh someone with a neuralink device can communicate faster than someone who is has a fully functional uh body and yeah so uh I

think you know faster than the fastest speed typist or auctioner the Esports tournaments are going to be like won't be able to speak faster than someone can communicate with a a neuralink leftly device maybe a very interesting part of this basically we currently um uh connect to standard uh inputs to the computer through Mouse and keyboards 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 very excited yeah no that's that's a good point um

because the the current um input devices are centered around human hands yeah so it's like we've got these you know little meat sticks that we move and um the this certain rate at which you can move your little move your fingers and and so we've got like The Mouse and the keyboard and or the joystick control you know like Xbox controller or something like that uh but you really don't need that you can actually uh you don't you don't you don't need since you're no long if you're if you're not trying to use your hands

you don't you actually don't need those uh conventional uh control mechanisms um and so this is why like ultimately I think you'll be able to do uh conceptu ual uh telepathy like where you can communicate entire Concepts uh uncompressed to someone else with a neuralink or to the computer even today we have some problems here where like you know if you don't feel the mouse clicking under your finger how do you know it actually happened you know you're you're seeing it on the screen but you don't actually feel the mouse click you don't have the

appropriate accepted feedback of you know the keys under your fingertips or the trackpad under your so there's all sorts of interesting ux challenges how to actually give the user some sense of what their decoder is actually doing what they what the earing is actually doing when they're trying to use so Wireless yeah it's Bluetooth um it's 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 hiid

is just the name of the protocol for like sending bits from a mouse into a computer uh yeah I plug into basically anything yeah yeah I I think we we chose that interface because it's ubiquitous basically any devices are are have Bluetooth capabilities our our long-term goal is to actually have our own protocol you know that is safe and secure U but for now you know we've chosen it for interoperability so the question is can a neuralink chip repair the paralysis in the long term you know we can't do that right now we have done

sort of preliminary work implanting a second neuralink in the spinal cord and we can restore naturalistic looking hand and leg movements in animal models um but this isn't something that is you know don't 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 yes there's no reason in theory that we can't repair paralysis yeah um I mean essentially to to I mean there's there's no 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 uh that uh if they are transferred past the point where the the nerves are damaged essentially just it's basically a Communications Bridge um so you bridge the communications from the motor cortex um past the the point uh in the necr spine where the nose are damaged and you should like it just phys it is possible from a physics standpoint to restore full body functionality from a physic standpoint it's a very hard technical problem but it but it is there is nothing that prevents it happening from a physics standpoint so in

terms of next phase of roll out well um we really want to make sure that uh 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 um but we we hope to have uh you know if things go well High single digits this year uh and uh I don't know maybe this is somewhat dependent on regulatory approval U and how 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 you know it's not that we' built only one device and one surgery we've done hundreds of surgery we' built thousand thousands and thousands of devices even for just the the ability to unearth any sort of lowf frequency failure mode so 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 possible we go through obviously the appropriate hurdles right that are regulatory

challenges and proving out the device with yeah and the the device implantation really needs to become um almost entirely if not entirely automatic uh in the same way that say lasic ey surgery is done U you know you don't have an opthalmologist with a a laser cutter by hand that that would be crazy uh but the opthalmologist oversees the uh the lasic machine and make sure that the settings are correct and then the the machine does everything and restores your eyesight uh it's really remarkable how many people have had their eyesight restored uh with 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 whatever kind of upgrades or you know brain fixes are needed um that's that's reviewed uh by medical expert OB we want to make sure that that is reviewed correctly but but it really needs to be automatic so you sit down and and within 10 minutes uh you have a neur link device installed very very fast I mean it's very sort of

cyber punk you know dosx if you play those games when we new start to interface with other devices like wheelchair is great question we currently focusing on uh controlling computers and unlock Independence in the virtual world of course our plan is as we mentioned earlier robotic arm and wheelchair to unlock 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 quite soon well it seems like if if the wheelchair has a an app well the

wheelchair just needs to have have an interface it does so if if the wheelchair has a Bluetooth interface uh you you could just Bluetooth interface to the wheelchair yeah and and um but that's probably something we should do we're pretty soon it's really a matter of paperwork of showing that you can do it safely you don't like drive off a cliff well I think we well we can the speed so it doesn't go King off into disaster um but uh you know so just make it go slowly at first uh but yeah so uh being

able to sort of really the the nework device just should work generally for anything that's got a Bluetooth interface including potentially an Optimus asking uh yeah you yes you could communicate with Optimus uh yep absolutely Optimus will well we Al also be able to talk to Optimus but like why not just beam it but you could just yeah instead of talking just you could just beam it directly or if if someone has lost the use of speech then then they can still communicate to an Optimus uh they can communicate telepathically to Optimus or by bluetooth

um and um and and so even if someone has you know completely less the ability to speak they could still uh control Optimus or with their computer or phone I mean also like if you have an optimist and you have a neuralink you can just directly map the brain signal to control of the physical arm of the robot and that's a very meaningful thing like if you're you know folks that have spin cord injury one of the biggest requests is to be able to scratch yourself this is something that quite annoying actually um and if

you have a scratch on your face like you can't fall asleep until you scratch it uh you know it's very convenient to be able to move something physically towards you to be able to scratch similar things like eating food you know if you need somebody to feed you very hard to have know dinner with friends in a way that is you know sort of a normal social experience and so if you can feed yourself pick up a fork and actually eat a piece of chicken on your own uh you know that's a big deal uh

it prevents and saves a lot of interactions with caretakers and other people in 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 um 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 uh well we we could actually attach an Optimus arm or Optimus legs uh and uh do a neuralink implant so that the the motor commands from your brain that go would go

uh to your your biological arms now go to your robot arms or robot legs um and again you you'd 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 like if you're a piano player or a I don't know anything that requires extremely fast know hand movements that you could actually have a pretty imbalanced right-and robotic arm control versus leftand physical Arm Control because one of them yeah like I said this is kind

of a cyberpunk DEX in future where you have cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your biological uh lims and uh it's certainly the we'll have a much you know as as particularly as we expand to a large number of of um of of customers or patients for neuralink uh the understanding of the brain will improve dramatically uh because the 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

um high bandwidth electroids in the brain yeah I think this is underappreciated as a research tool to to move that whole effort forward of really knowing you know what the physical substance of human thought is we don't know uh to the to the degree that we need to so neuralink is actually a a very powerful research tool yeah I mean we I think we can ultimately uh understand and and fix uh quite severe psychosis or like if if somebody's got like the if somebody's got like a a like a delusion that they have a chip

in their brain yeah I was wondering if you're going to mention that one um we just want to be clear that there's only one person with a neur link chip in their brain um so for people out there who think we've put their chip in their brain we wouldd like to assure you for what it's worth you probably won't believe us but we did not put each chip in your brain okay um so there actually a remarkable number of people who think we have put a tri in their brain but we have not um but

in the future if you would like us to put a chip in your brain which will perhaps help with the issue of thinking that you have a chip in your brain uh then we will be able to do so uh so there there are people that have uh severe schizophrenia they've got basically things that um their brain is malfunctioning in some way and um and this is actually due to really like physical circuitry issues you can think of the brain as like uh really it's a it's a biological computer and if if some of the

circuits are crossed it's going to uh you know it's going to crash or it's going to have issues that caus it to not work um but with a neuralink device we can fix those issues and uh you know give someone who I think pro has say severe schizophrenia or or psychosis of some kind uh allow them to live a normal life I think that is one of the likely things in the future so uh yeah I mean yeah you can certainly imagine like uh I'm sure people have like parents grandparents who've uh you know have

memory that's uh 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 I mean that that's actually one of the personal reason um in many way like forms of you're literally losing your and part of your identity yeah which is a just a very very go through yeah and it's really just it's a glitch in the biological computer that is uh a fixable uh glitch it's like like a 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 five hours on a sing charge and it takes about 45 minutes to charge one thing we've learned from Nolan is that that's actually one of the main limiters for him using it more uh 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 it in some weeks yeah 70 hours in the week yeah I mean

just for context like you sleep roughly eight hours a night so that's you know we're doing better than the bed like the bed is 56 hours a week of use roughly and uh so 70 hours a week of uses I challenge you to think about products that you've actually use for that duration but that's again some of these points are worth like emphasizing again like the that noan our first neuralink recipient has used the rolling device for 70 hours in a week which is incredible you probably won't enjoy that I'm sharing his computer use publicly

but well I mean I assure you it's for productive things only no um but actually so one of the things we've learned is that in the next version of the device we really need to like double or you know increase that battery life and so I think uh 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 8 hours of use and the goal is to actually get to all they use so you can just charge um

you know maybe in your sleep sleeping pillow exactly as soon as you got like 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 like it's not just duration of bettery use but also can you recharge it yourself independently so we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make that feasible because then that

means that you can this is what no one does you can use the device charge it use the device charge it use the device without needing anybody to come in and sort of help you with that which is a big deal if you're trying to play C 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 you know about this big um and we actually put it in the um sleeve of a of a hatan or a beanie and

then he wears it and then says with the voice command charge charger energize that's the one he likes how writing work uh so so uh yeah the current device that Nolan has is is is is reading um so it's trying to read his essentially like wrist movement from from one one hand um that's also you know with with like in the future like would pretty cool to give Noland a a second implant that would allow the other hand to be used and also have higher uh obviously higher active electrode count so then you can play

two essentially play games two-handed because that's nor only how you play games um and uh but then with with writing uh it's really just uh it's an electrical impulse instead of like reading electrical impulses from the neurons you you issue an electrical impulse uh which is obviously critical for vision so vision is is writing which is just triggering electrical impulse in the vision part of the brain um and that like activates a a pixel so we we actually do have this working um in monkeys and we had have we've had it working with monkeys for

a while now uh where you can sort of flash a pixel and then you watch where the monkey obviously the monkey's like what that monkey a little surprised to see like hey there's a flash here and a flash there but it's gets used to it after a while uh but it just you you can see that that the pixel in the right location because the monkey's eyes will will Dark to that location it's not on on the screen like there's no pixel on the screen there's no pixel on the screen in your brain yeah just

like just verify that that the the that you're triggering a pixel in the right part of the brain so um you know the initial resolution for uh Vision will be relatively low you know sort of Atari Graphics type of thing but over time it it could potentially be better than normal vision and then I guess in terms of some additional applications for where writing to the brain can be useful is M uh applications as Bliss mentioned there is feedback there's appropr acceptive feedback there's a ttile 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 that's right adjacent to motor cortex could could be benefit motor movements so any changes in neural growth after the device is inserted we don't see any any signs of neural damage uh but I and I guess we we have seen some rebound on some of the electrodes right correct and then also I

mean I guess I guess you know rain is very plastic yeah it's not that plastic well it it does diminish quite a bit after age 20 throughout childhood uh especially when you get to age about 25 brain really is done cooking yeah but there are there is a little bit of damage done with each insertion uh but it's a minuscule amount compared to anything else U there and so um it's an easy amount of damage to recover from and it's really only detectable on cutting pieces of the brain after uh after the animal's no longer

alive and looking at them under a microscope you can't really tell during life that there's been any brain another way to interpret this question have the if you find any 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 you know if he can figure this out he can help

share this knowledge with I mean he's like on Friday night at 800m you know he's starting a session of like you know figuring out himself how to how to push his own performance to the next level and uh that's really a unique learning process cuz there's not many people in the world that had the experience of moving something with your bra and so there's a lot of nuance to like okay how exactly should I imagine or attempt to move my wrist to get that thing to uh yeah he's really died that into also just the

sheer number of hours that he's used even in the past six months right yeah um in many ways like I me he's using it in his travel in his plane right effectively BCI has left the lab yeah yeah yeah I mean one of the questions is how close are we converting thoughts into text um I mean right right now it's more about Moving Co from the screen on on a virtual keyboard um but um long term you should be able to really transmit entire wordss faster than anyone could possibly type able to type hello world

today directly from but we're still in the early days making that a polished experience I mean the other things that we're looking at is sign language right at the end of the day it is a movement of a of and into yeah that's true was the brain trying to naturally push the threads out I mean this is sort of a universal feature of any implant in the body the body tries to reject it uh and the goal of the surgeons and the technology team is to fight that and so with artificial hips and with you

know screws in the spine we've done a really good job of finding biocompatible materials and techniques to uh fix those implants in the body I mean past a certain age it's getting hard to find someone without some kind of implant you know a knee hip uh some kind of screws in their spine um and so we've got this problem pretty well solved uh so to answer your question yes the body is trying to get rid of any implant but we can ensure that basically can't it's also worth highlighting that the threads have not actually moved

um in the past five months um there's there's some still minor movements in terms of like some maybe maybe getting pushed in a little bit pushed out a little bit but it's it's more or less very stable and been stable for and the reason for that is you know once you once you do um a brain Sur surgy it takes some time for the tissues to come in and then and then you know the start tissue or the neom membrane to actually come in and then anchor the threads in place and once that happens everything

has been stable and seen much movement that's where the world record performance starts to come in yeah that was a couple weeks ago yeah yeah the threads like it is important that the threads be extremely tiny if they're extremely tiny then the the brain uh does not the smaller they are the less likely the brain is to react to to them so that's why you want the threads to be extremely tiny and also to minimize any damage to neurons um so by way on that note we we do plan to actually share some of the

um you know the tissue response in detail in some of the the later upcoming updates yeah it is quite a challenging um it's challenging on many fronts to do something like this uh because you're you're trying to read read and write electrical signals but you need to have the threads themselves need to be uh uh like electrically isolated um and and not subject to corrosion in the body so like the you know just metal by itself is so much subject to corrosion or or being attacked um so it's it's it's like in terms of the

various Coatings and things to actually make this electroid work while not actually eroding its performance over time is is very difficult human bodies are very very harsh it's it's a bag of salt water with B sensors that's elevated temperature that is well regulated mean I'm sure people have experience dropping their electronic devices in a seawater and in an instance yeah yeah so we we better sort of wrap this up soon um I if there's like a few few last questions um yes so a good question so what about uh upgrades um so yeah we we

we do think it's going to be important to be able to upgrade the device over time uh just like you wouldn't want um like an iPhone 1 stuck in your brain forever uh you you know if you've got an iPhone 15 you probably want the iPhone 15 not the iPhone 1 um so U I think people over time will uh be able to upgrade their their neural link so we'll take the neural link device out um and put a new one in um and uh we we have done this with um some of our um

animals and they've actually in one case we did it with we we upgrade our device three times and and uh with a pig we did with monkey as well able to do BCI yeah so and he's he's doing fine yeah has impant actually hit his I think his record with the last yeah with the with an upgrade no still beat him though no still beat him yes this is true humans are top of the species leaderboard right now pag is like what like eight or something p is like 8.5 BPS okay well it's a very

high score I'm not trying to put Pedro down and also to train a monkey to do that is like a whole Challenge on its own we have like the best animal care team world yeah I just do want to emphasize we we we we do our absolute best to take care of the the animals um and uh uh when we had like a USDA inspector come through she said that uh this was the the nicest animal uh facility she's ever seen in her entire life I mean they breakfast on an app like the the monkey

orders room service yes I'm not even kid we we have monkey room service which is a rare um in fact we're the only ones who offer monkey room service so we really do everything we can to maximize the welfare of the animals so all right with that uh thank you everyone for tuning in uh hope you found this interesting