Neuralink: What do brain implants do and why is Elon Musk making them?
Elon Musk’s Neuralink company is conducting its first human trials, implanting a tiny chip onto the surface of a person’s brain to allow them to talk directly with computers
By Matthew Sparkes
30 January 2024
Neuralink was founded by Elon Musk to create brain-computer interfaces
Costfoto/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
What is Neuralink?
Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk, who also runs SpaceX, Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, to create brain-computer interfaces: devices connected to the brain that allow people to communicate with computers by thought alone.
These devices could allow you to carry out simple tasks like searching for information or performing complex calculations with computers. They could theoretically also create technological telepathy, restore sight to people who are blind and enable paralysed people to control prostheses and regain their movement. Musk has said in the past that his company’s technology could allow humans to form “a sort of symbiosis” with AI.
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What has Neuralink achieved so far?
Neuralink’s device is around the size of a coin and designed to be implanted beneath the skull, with tiny wires reaching a short distance into the brain to read neuron activity. The company has already run trials in pigs and demonstrated that a monkey could play the classic video game Pong using the device. In May 2023, Neuralink said it had received approval for human tests.
According to a tweet by Musk, this trial is now taking place. An anonymous human subject received the implant on 28 January and is “recovering well”, said Musk. No other details of the trial have yet been released and Neuralink did not respond to New Scientist’s request for comment.
Has this been done before?
Musk’s company is far from the only group working on this idea. Many academic groups and commercial start-ups have already run human trials and succeeded in correctly interpreting brain signals into some kind of output.