Elon Musk unveils pig with chip in its brain | Neuralink

 Elon Musk unveils pig with chip in its brain | Neuralink

Neuralink Design

What you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gertry's head.

So this neural link connects to neurons that are in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with this now but that sends out.

Neural spikes which are detected here all right welcome to the neural link product demo.

I'm really excited to show you what we've got i think it's going to blow your mind also i want to emphasize the purpose of neural link like what do we what's our goal.

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It is to solve important spine and brain problems with a seamlessly seamlessly implanted device so you want to have a device that you can basically put in your head and feel.

Look totally normal but it solves some important problem in your brain or spine so going into the neural link architecture.

Neuralink Shape

What we've done over the past year is dramatically simplify.

The device so we we about a year ago we had a device which had a multiple parts including a piece that it had to sort of sit behind your ear.

it was it was it was complex and you and

 you wouldn't still look totally normal you'd have a thing behind your ear.

So we've simplified this to simply something that is about the size of a large coin and it goes in your skull replaces a piece of skull.

The wires then then connect within a few centimeters or about an inch away from the device and this is sort of what it looks like so.

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This is our little device it does that thing at the bottom is just to hold the threads in place because they're just like little fine

 wires.

I mean frankly to sort of simplify this what we're i mean it's more complicated than this but it's in a lot of ways it's kind of like a fitbit in your skull with tiny wires our current prototype version 0.9 has about a thousand channels.

So that's about 100 times better than the next best consumer device that's available and it's a 23 millimeters by eight millimeters.

It actually fits quite nicely in your skull because your skull is about 10 millimeters thick so it fits it's it goes flush with your skull it's invisible.

All you can see afterwards is a tiny scar and if it's under your hair you can't see it at all in fact i could have a neural link right now and you wouldn't know all right so it's also inductively charged.

So it's charged in the same way that you told your charge a smart watch or a phone and so you can use it all day charge it at night and have full functionality.

So you would really you know it would be completely seamless and yeah no wires in terms of getting a link so that you need to have the device a great device.

You also need to have a great robot that puts in the the electrodes and does the surgery so you want the surgery to be as automated and as possible.

The only way you can achieve the level of precision that's needed is with an advanced robot the link procedure.

The the installation of a link done in under an hourso you can basically go in the morning and leave the hospital in the afternoon and it can be done without general anesthesia.

This is our surgical robot and we actually ultimately want this robot to do essentially the entire surgery.

In everything from from incision removing the the skull inserting the electrodes placing the device and then closing things up and having you ready to leave.

We want to have a fully automated system so this shows you a sort of close-up view which i think is actually not too gruesome of the electrodes being inserted in the brain.

If you look closely you'll see that um that's it's a little counterintuitive that if the electrodes are inserted very carefully that there is no bleeding and so the if you have very tiny electrodes.

If they're inserted very carefully so the robot actually images the brain and make sure to avoid any veins or arteries.

Neuralink Features

That the electrodes can be inserted with no noticeable damage so you will have no noticeable neural damage in inserting the link so does it actually work and what i'm excited to show you.

I'll quote like the three little pigs demo and if our animal houses we're bringing out the the pigs and what we're gonna show you is a well i'll walk right over.

What we have in pen number one is joyce

 and she does not have an implant obviously healthy.

Happy we're trying to get go through it out and this is how you know it's a live demo so here's dorothy and in the case of dorothy used to have an implant and then we removed the implant.

This is a very important thing to demonstrate is reversibility so if you if you have a neural link and then you decide you don't want it or you want to get an upgrade.

The neural link is removed isn't removed in such a way that you are still healthy and happy afterwards.

What dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the neural link remove it and be healthy happy indistinguishable from a normal pig.

This is a high energy pig um all right gertrude thanks for coming out so what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gotri's head.

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This neural link connects to neurons that are in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with a snout but that sends out neural spikes which are detected here and so on the screen you can see each of the spikes from the 1024 electrodes.

Then if you if she yeah she shuffles around touches this knot in the ground

 or you kind of feed her some food pigs low food then you can see the neurons will fire much more than when you're not touching this now.

That's what's making the beeping sound

 all right cool so as you can see we have a healthy and happy pig initially shy but obviously high energy and and uh you know kind of loving life and she's had the implant for two months.

This is a healthy and happy pig with an implant that is two months old two months old and working well all right cool um and then um we actually have hope this works is so we said well what if we do two neurolink implants.

We've been able to do uh dual neural link implants uh in actually i think three pigs at this point and we have a couple of them here um and we're able to show that you can actually have multiple neural links implanted um and again healthy and happy.

Indistinguishable from a normal pig so um

 so it's possible to have multiple links in your head and have them all be sending out signals and you're working well all right so we just showed you a demonstration of reading brain activity.

Let's see probably see that um as i'm saying each of those dots represents a neural spike and the blue chart at the bottom is showing an accumulation of neural spikes in that region.

In terms of additional uh brain reading activity uh when we had say um one of our pigs on a treadmill and we're gonna treadmil it's very funny concept really and we take the readings from the neurons.

We try to predict the position position of the joints and so we say we have the predicted position of the joints.

Pig Brain Activity Test

Then we we measure the actual position of the joints you can see that they're almost exactly aligned so we're able with a wireless neural neural implant to actually predict the position of of all of the limbs in the pig's body with very high accuracy.

Now in terms of of writing to the brain or stimulating neurons we also need precise control of the electric field in space and time we need a wide range of current for different brain regions.

Some some regions require delicate stimulation some require a lot of current

 and you want obviously no harm to the brain over time.

The way we um by the way we analyze the

 the stimulated stimulating neurons is with a two-photon microspicy i always have trouble pronouncing that microscopy.

it's very impressive technology you can actually literally see in real time how the neurons are firing so uh the the red sort of things are the neurons red red sort of flashing things are the neurons uh firing or i should say.

The electrodes firing so the red things are electrodes firing and then the green are the neuron bodies responding to the current from the electrode and we're making good progress towards clinical studies