I understand putting a chip in the body when it’s only supposed to passively hold information (e.g. one of those tagging chips for lost pets). But if it’s a chip that’s supposed to do something (say, translating brain signals into actions), how does it “know” what it’s supposed to do? I’m picturing wiring up individual nerves to the chip to provide it with information, but that can’t be right.
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The chip reads and/or writes electrical impulses using tiny electrodes capable of detecting/emitting neural polarization/depolarization within a short distance of them. Electrodes pick up local changes in the electrical field and a downstream processor tries to make sense of them.
Chip has little connectors that can sense neurons in your brain firing. Converts those impulses into digital signals.
Binary is just on / off (1 and 0), after all.
Yes, you would literally ‘wire’ nerves to the chip/device. The ones I’ve seen have basically a bunch of tiny needles/wires on one side that can sense electrical impulses from individual nerve cells.
In that case, you would be looking at essentially a complete little computer of sorts. This computer might have sensors for specific environmental bits around it, such as nerves, which it might be constantly sensitive to the signals of. These nerve signals would then be interpreted by the computer on the chip according to whatever instructions/setup is was designed with, and go from there.
>I’m picturing wiring up individual nerves to the chip to provide it with information, but that can’t be right.
That’s (almost) exactly right. It uses tiny sensors – which can be described as “wires” – attached to neurons and detects changes in those neurons.
Note that the exact details depend a lot on the chip and what it’s doing. Since you mentioned brain signals, that’s likely what is going on in such a chip. If a chip were, say, monitoring blood glucose, then it would use different sensors – it would have something attached to your bloodstream, not your nerves.
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