I’ve seen the pigs video, but what are they going to do once the FDA approval goes trough ?
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Realistically nueralink doesn’t actually work all that well. However the theory behind is that human nuerons work by communicating very small electrical charges between each other, while the charges are small, they’re still big enough to be measured. The way nuerolink probably works is by measuring those charges near where it is implanted. This can move into controling an external object because the brain is suprisingly flexable and capable of reassigning what some parts of your brain does, so it reassigns the parts of the brain that the neurolink is attatched to be able to interact with the neurolink
I am an electroneurodiagnostic technologist and I read brain waves for a living. Neuralink would not work. We can we can detect seizures/comas/brain death and a few other serious diseases on an EEG (the test used to record your brain waves) and that is it. Neurologist and epileptologist cannot know any other information from our brain waves. It doesn’t know what we are thinking, it doesn’t know what limbs we are moving, it doesn’t know anything. It’s just to look at the rhythm/speed/ and spread of the patterns. The technology to use your brain waves to do something just isn’t possible. It’s like looking at an EKG of the heart beat but it’s of the brain and it’s got a lot more wires.
Neuralink is supposed to be implanted *into* the skull, above the motor cortex to read its activity. *In theory*, that would allow it to know what limbs a person is trying to move, as different sections of the motor cortex’ surface have different functions.
In practice, such an invasive procedure has an enormous risk of damage and complications, both immediate and long term, as we have seem in the *thousands* of deaths and incapacitations during neuralink animal trials.
Not only that, but brains also vary between person to person and the areas the neuralink implant is supposed to read are very small, so even if the initial implantation is successful the chip is not guaranteed to work.
Brains are living things with a lot of variation, subtleties and plasticity that current electronics can’t reasonably adapt to no matter how poweful they get. It is like fitting a square peg into a round hole.
One day we might figure out safe, reliable brain-machine interfaces, but that day is not today, and the way neuralink rushed into live tests and is trying to rush into human trials is counter-productive.
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