NEURALINK - WOULD YOU LIKE TO PUT A CHIP IN YOUR BRAIN?

Get ready to put a computer in your brain. This crazy idea could only be implemented by real-life iron man i.e Elon Musk. 

Give it a read to know more about this insanely cool and seemingly dangerous technology.

So First question, why even make this kind of technology? what kind of things they are trying to build?

This company was started in 2016 and its goal is to develop implantable brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). They want to make a device which can treat serious brain diseases in the short-term, with the eventual goal of human enhancement, sometimes called transhumanism.

Source of Inspiration?

Musk said he got partly interested in the idea from a science fiction concept called "neural lace" that is part of the fictional universe in The Culture, a series of 10 novels by Iain M. Banks.

Musk defined the neural lace as a "digital layer above the cortex" that would not necessarily imply extensive surgical insertion but ideally an implant through a vein or artery. Musk explained that the long-term goal is to achieve "symbiosis" with artificial intelligence", which Musk perceives as an existential threat to humanity if it goes unchecked. 

How it works?

So, human cognition has two systems one for the limbic system and other for cortex. Cortex is tasked with thinking, planning, and stuff while limbic is for controlling our emotions, hunger, desires, etc. Neuralink creates the third layer in our brain, it is a digital super-intelligent layer augmenting our brain. We already have this layer in our life in the form of mobile, laptops, etc. But neural link takes this to whole another level. Right now we have all the information on our fingertips but soon it is going to be right in our brains. Fingers and speech can't match up with the speed of the brain. Our brain provides much higher bandwidth as compared to these devices. Thousands of tiny thread will be put in our brain capable of detecting as well as signals generated by our brain and through these signals, we'll receive and send information. These threads are very small as compared to today's standard, just 1/10th of hair thickness. Each thread is installed via robot so don't worry about any kind of blood loss. Another very interesting thing is that even if the signal coming from these tiny electrodes are not accurate, our brain can learn to interpret these signals because of brain plasticity.

All this stuff has been done before where doctors inserted electrodes in patients suffering from Parkinson's.  The traditional method uses much bigger electrodes and the chance of getting a brain hemorrhage is around 1%, which is quite high considering that someone's life depends on it. Another difference between tradition and Neuralink is that while Neuralink uses 1000's of threads normal method uses only around 10 electrodes.

A specially designed chip called NL chip is used for this purpose, tiny electrodes are put less than 60 microns away to detect a signal, this signal is amplified, filtered and converted into digital format and the information is sent to a pod sitting behind the ear. Pod device will get all the updates and changes not the inner interface of Neuralink and brain. Remove the pod and this computer shuts off. This chip can handle 20000 signals/second coming from the brain. 

It's Applications

First is to tap into motor cortex which sends signals to the spine and onto the muscles. It could be used to cure deafness as sound will directly reach to the brain. It could restore the movement of the entire body. Initial tests were performed on monkeys, they were tasked to operate computers and to everyone 's surprise, they did control the computers. Human testing will start in 2020. Other applications include telepathy, downloading apps directly into someone's brain, downloading memories. But playing games directly into your brain seems to be a thing of future.

Possibilities are endless if used in a proper way this could change the very way of our interaction with the physical world and if not this has the potential to destroy entire humankind.
Here is the company's website where you can watch the live event of this technology as well as the research paper regarding that: Neuralink's Website