By Arjun Kapur
If I asked you the way you’d feel regarding someone opening up your skull and sticking a few thousand electrodes to your brain, I’m fairly positive I can imagine what your response would be. However, what if one day a surgery like that was as simple as removing your wisdom tooth? And what if it may change several lives for the better? I do know it still may not sound that appealing; having stuff stuck in your brain, however bear with me.
In 2016, Elon Musk, father of X Æ A-12, founded Neuralink.
A neurotechnology company that aims to at least one day implant small computer chips into people’s brains to enhance their quality of life.
Within the short term, suppose paralyzed folks having the ability to use phones and computers merely with the power of their minds. within the long term, suppose human improvement — integrating AI into human brain function.
So, it all sounds a touch fiction, that shouldn't be that shocking being that the idea was inspired by a series of science fiction novels. however truly, it's nowhere close to as fictional as you would possibly think. Here's the issue.
Your brain is absurdly complicated.
Harvard professor and neuroscientist Jeff Litchman said that if everything that can be learnt about the brain spans 1 mile, we have only reached 3 inches. But with the little we do know; we have already done amazing things. So this isn’t futurism. It’s achievable. Just very difficult.
Still a lot of the brain still remains a mystery. Bit that are harder to access and investigate. But once we understand the brain better, how do we use that knowledge to interface with it. Well, your brain contains about 86 billion neurons, and they are responsible for communicating with the rest of your body with the use of your central nervous system.
By connecting an electrode to an individual neuron, we can monitor exactly what signals its sending, and potentially send signals back to it!
Currently, we can make a brain machine interface that has 1 to 200 electrodes monitoring 1 to 200 neurons, which is very limited to the grand scale of things. I know that sounds like we are nowhere at all, but there are a couple of things to remember. The first is Moore’s law. In 1965, co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, observed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every single year since the integrated transistor had been invented. And he predicted that this would continue for the foreseeable future, which it mostly has!
In BMIs, there’s an equivalent to this. Stevenson’s and Kording’s law: which states that the number of neurons we can simultaneously monitor over the past 50 years has doubled every 7.4 years.
If this trend continues, we will be able to map every single neuron in the brain as soon as year 2225.
So not that soon.
But the second thing to remember is that we are already utilizing what we have learnt to make extraordinary innovations, so it’s not like we will be waiting for 200 years before we start seeing the benefits. It’s going to happen sooner than we think, and the potential ramifications (whether medical, technological, neurological, ethical or even evolutionary) are colossal.
At present, it’s not entirely clear where this technology can take us. It’s easy to imagine integrating our brains with existing systems such as turning on the lights or writing an email just by thinking about it. It’s also exciting to think of achieving things that, right now, might seem impossible. Upgrading your brain’s processing power, downloading fully formed skills, or even instantly learning to speak a different language! But the real potential of Neuralink and other technology like it, is in the unknown’s unknowns. it’s in the things we haven even thought of yet, and it will only occur to us as the technology evolves.
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