Welcome, I hope this is working. Welcome to neural link up live
update. We're going to tell you about
the progress of the first patient with neural link and
sort of your recap of of the progress there.
Then talk about what changes we were making for the second
patient, which we're hoping to do an implant in the next week
or so. And this is for our first
product, which is called Telepathy, which enables you to
control a computer or a phone just by thinking.
So let's in fact. So we'll start off with just
some introductions. DJ you want to start?
Hi everyone, my name is DJ Saul. I'm an electrical engineer and a
chip designer. By training I led the design of
first several generations of the neural link implant.
Currently I was on the founding team and currently a president.
I'm Matthew McDougal. I'm a practicing neurosurgeon
and head of Neurosurgery at Neurolink.
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, head of branding
interfaces applications. And I'm bliss.
I'm a software engineer at Neurolink trying to figure out
how to turn brand activity into cool stuff in the world.
All right. Thank you.
Well, let's see. So we'll just get going into the
presentation. So our first product is sort of
like I said, we call telepathy, which is enables the person with
Neuralink implant to control their phone or computer just by
thinking. And once you can control your
phone or computer, you can essentially control almost
anything just and literally just by thinking.
So there's no eye tracking or anything.
It is purely, purely your thoughts.
So this is really quite, quite a profound device that can help a
lot of people who have lost the connection between their, their
brain and body. So imagine people like Stephen
Hawking, who you know, if imagine if he, if he could
communicate at the same speed as someone who had still had the
connection to their brain and body.
So it's really something that can help millions of people
around the world. And it's a, it's part of our
overall goal of enabling a very high bandwidth connection
between the brain and, and your and the rest of the world and
your computers. The long term goal to which
sounds a little esoteric, is to mitigate the the risk of, of the
civil civilizational risk of AI by having a sort of closer
biosis between human intelligence and digital
intelligence. But that, that'll take many
years along the way, we're, we're going to help solve a lot
of brain injury or spinal injury issues.
So, and then with our first product apathy, that's, that's
going to be really quite profound that there is also
potential long term for bridging the gaps or if there are damaged
or severed neurons being able to span the gap between the brain's
motor cortex to the spine to enable someone to use their body
again. I think that would be very
exciting. And it's, you know, that that is
something that is possible in the long term.
And then our second product, which we've demonstrated to work
with monkeys is Blind side, which would enable someone who
is completely blind or lost both eyes or completely lost their
optic nerve to be able to see. So that's that's something that
we hope to demonstrate in the future.
So let's just give you a sense of what the device is a way to
think about the neural link device is kind of like a a
Fitbit or an Apple Watch with with tiny wires or electrodes.
Those those tiny wires are implanted in the in the brain
and they read and write electrical signals.
So a lot of people think the brain is incredibly mysterious
thing. It's it, it is mysterious in a
lot of ways, but but it is actually, it does operate with
like electrical signals. So if you can read and write
those electrical signals, you can interface with the brain and
the devices is sized so that it is the same size as the as the
piece of skull that is removed. So if it's like a few
centimeters diameter of skull that's removed.
We replaced that with the device after implanting the tiny wires
with a surgical robot and that enables read write capability to
the neurons. Completely wirelessly.
Yeah, yes, exactly. It's completely wirelessly.
So like, I, I could, I could have a neural link right now,
you wouldn't know. And it it charges inductively.
So you could just basically have an electromagnetic ad that that
you charge the device with. So yeah, it's like an Apple
Watch. Exactly so.
Except that it's actually a much harder technical a challenge to
solve, given that there's limit as to how much heat the brain
tissue whereas in for. Phones and have a hot watch you
don't really care how much if. It's sitting on a table.
Sure. Yeah, it's also it's got to go
through scan and stuff as well in our case.
So it's, it is a tougher challenge to to charge and to if
I bandwidth communications given that it's got to go through skin
and hair and stuff. We have solved it.
We have solved it, yeah. So yeah.
Yeah. So our first step with the
telepathy is basically to unlock digital independence for people
with policies and to allow them control the computer just with
their mind without moving the body.
And our goal is to provide them the same level of control,
functionality and reliability that I have when I'm using a
computer, even better than the level of control I have.
And it's not a high bar. For you, just to be clear, this
guy, he's controlling this with his brain, so he's not like you
can't see his hands in this video, but he's not using a
mouse and keyboard. Just, you know, thinking about
how to move the cursor and playing Civilization.
No eye tracker. Right, there's no eye tracking
from I. Mean.
He's lost. He's like this is.
Watch this on. Twitter just thinking that's it
just. Thinking like just a couple
days. Cursor move here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like the last night or
two nights ago something. Yeah.
I think I think the way he also described it is he's using the.
Yeah. He has many more videos on his
on the platform. Definitely check them out.
Yeah, so you can string that live and also can talk and like
move his head without a problem multi time.
Yeah, you guys like if you join this live stream, you can ask
him questions, he'll he'll tell you all about what it's like to.
Also I think I haven't played Civilization myself, but I think
this is actually not easy mode. This is expert mode.
This is Emperor mode. Emperor mode if you have played
sift emperor mode. It's like the highest difficulty
level. The point is like this is a
commonly demanding task while live streaming, playing the
hardest mode of team and he's able to do that while moving.
Talking, engaging with you know the audience while playing.
One of the other games he likes to play a lot is chess.
I think it gets lost sometimes that he's actually playing
speed. Chess against me, yeah.
Which requires an incredibly high fidelity degree of control
and speed of control in order to be able to win.
So also another cool stuff about about our device is that we can
use it anywhere, anytime, also on a plane, during a flight,
while creating really cool means of care.
Also, our device unlocks things that previously were impossible
for our participants. For example, we're able to
connect him to his gaming consoles, which they Mario Kart
with friends and family and it was lovely to see them playing
together after years, but he couldn't do it since he's
injured. Imagine if you're sitting
umbrella over from the sky on a plane.
You look over, he's making a cat meme.
No hands, no movement. Yeah.
Live in a real world. Yeah, it's strange, strange
time. Yeah.
And he loves using the device and using independently daily to
watch videos, read, play games using the browser.
And the key metrics that we care is to make sure our device is
actually useful is to is basically the amount of hours
you use the device daily and weekly.
And we track it weekly since the since the surgery and on weeks
that he's not too busy and not travelling, he can even reach 70
hours of using the device a week.
This is amazing. And he would of course love to
use it more, but need to run resource sessions, he needs to
sleep sometimes and also of course to charge the device once
in a while. Hopefully we'll improve that
over time, I think. That maybe not obvious to people
who are watching this. Like it's a normal MacBook he's
controlling. This isn't like some limited
edition thing where there's only a few options like he can just
do anything that you can do on a MacBook Pro.
Same one I have on my desk. Actually, it's the exact same
one. And maybe another interesting
point is that on the first day he used BCI brain control, he
was able to break the previous world record for cursor control
is by using the brain. And recently he even doubled it
and was able to outperform about 10% of our engineered neurolink.
And you can be sure that we are very good in this game and very
quick. And if you want to check out how
well, how well you can do it, you can do it on our website.
And it's very addictive games. Yeah, it's a very simple game.
You just have to click on the square.
But but it's it's it's it's actually, even though it sounds
silly, it's it's quite a yeah, it can be quite a, it sounds
like it could be quite addictive.
And it's especially if you get a low score and you think there's
no way I got to. So I, I mean, anyone who wants
to try this, I recommend going to theneurolink.com website and
seeing, seeing if you can beat Nolan's record.
And it's that you will find that's actually quite difficult
to do so. And this is really with version
one of the device and with only a small percentage of the
electrodes that are that are working.
So this is, this is really just the beginning, but even the
beginning is twice as good as the world record.
This is important to emphasize the, you know, the media has a
habit of of saying that the glass is 10% empty, but but
actually it's 90% full. So I think it's really quite an
accomplishment of the neural link team to have achieved with
first with the first patient, the first device twice the world
record for the range computer bandwidth.
That's really an astonishing, an amazingly great outcome and it's
only going to be get better from here.
So the potential is to ultimately get, I think to
megabit level. So that's, that's part of the
long term goal of, of improving the, the bandwidth of the brain
computer interface. If you think about like how low
the bandwidth normally is between a human and a device,
it's the average bandwidth is extremely low.
It's it's, I said less than one bit per second over the course
of a day. If there are 86,400 seconds in a
day, you're outputting less than that number of bits to any any
given device except in perhaps very rare circumstances.
So the this is actually quite important for for AI, you know,
basically for for human AI, symbiosis is just being able to
communicate at A at a speed. Yeah, I can follow.
So yeah, just to emphasize again, he's performing at this
extremely high level with about 15% of his channels functional.
And so we want to mitigate any of the problems that led to that
situation. So, you know, the brain is a
fascinating organ. Share with you some of the
secrets about the brain. During any typical brain
surgery, a small amount of air is introduced into the skull.
That's because neurosurgeons like to have as much room as
possible around the brain. And so there's this little known
control mechanism of allowing the CO2 concentration in the
blood to rise a bit, which allows the brain to either
expand or contract depending on where you target that CO2.
But typically neurosurgeons will have the brain shrink by
lowering CO2. What we're going to do in our
future surgeries is keep the CO2 concentration actually quite
normal, maybe even slightly elevated, and that'll allow the
brain to stay its normal size and shape during surgery.
That should eliminate this air pocket that we saw in the first
participant. Now that air pocket we think may
have contributed to eating up some of the thread slack as as
the air bubble migrated to be under the implant, push the
brain away from the implant. And so that's easy enough to
fix. Another consideration that we
want to focus on for our upcoming participants is that
the brain, think of it like a really complex folded onion.
It's layer upon layer of sheets of neurons all over the surface
of the brain folded into this, you know, odd looking shape.
The folds of the brain travel down deep into the brain and and
along with it go those onion layers of neurons.
And if we insert very close to one of the folds where there may
be very useful information encoded in neurons, we may end
up travelling with our threads parallel to some of the layers
of neurons that we're most interested in, avoiding them
entirely. To avoid that possibility, we're
going to insert in our future participants more close to the
middle of the apex of the folds, ensuring that we're crossing the
layers of interest, layer five of the cortex.
I also think that it's important to highlight here those tiny
wires that Elon mentioned, They're fraction of a human
hair. They're very flexible,
intentionally so, because brains constantly moving and you want
the electrodes to be moving with the brain, causing less of the
scarring. And it's actually impossible for
a human neurosurgeon, however talented Matthew is to actually
maneuver them by. So we have a surgical robot that
we built that can actually precisely target them in any
three-dimensional space, XY as well as Z with Micron level
precision while avoiding vasculature so that you don't
disrupt the the and and cause immune response from happening.
So we we actually have the technology to be able to place
them exactly where we want them in three.
Yeah, it was truly amazing to see the surface of the brain
after the robot had inserted all the electrodes on the 1st
participant without a drop of blood.
Insight. It's really quite an
achievement. Yes, something that probably
most people don't realize is that the the brain appears to be
sort of somewhat undifferentiated.
So if you look at the cortex, it looks like a whole bunch of
folds that where, you know, maybe like it's, it's, it's not
obvious. Just looking at a take a picture
of the brain that, that, that it's the brain is highly
differentiated. That there's you pretty much
know exactly where the part of the brain is that controls your
right hand and your left hand and your leg and that kind of
thing or vision. It's actually quite precisely
located. It's not some people like might
think, look at the brain like, oh, it could be, it could be
anywhere. But actually we it's your brain
is highly differentiated, even though it doesn't look it's
yeah. Do you want to describe how we
actually where like how we identify where to drill the?
So we can we can put a patient that is considering this implant
into an F MRI, so functional magnetic resonance imaging
machine and ask them to imagine hand movements that you know,
because of the spinal cord injury don't happen.
But just imagining those hand movements causes these areas of
the brain to light up in the F MRI scanner.
And so we have a pretty good idea based in, in fact, for each
individual participant, which part of their brain is going to,
you know, respond to imagined movements of the hand.
And so we can map those imagined movements, much as we all do
when moving a mouse to controlling a cursor on a
screen, even without the use of a mouse.
Yeah. But anyway, I think it's kind of
an important point that like, it's not like you're the part of
your brain that controls your hand might be anywhere in the
cortex. It's this is not the case.
It's going to be in a very specific region and it's going
to be extremely common across people.
Precision is key too. Yeah, the left-handed,
right-handed in my mind too. Like if you're right-handed, you
want the device on the left side.
Yeah, the lateral side to the hand, that's dominant.
Yeah, the left side of your brain controls right side of
your. Body.
Yeah. Everything's crossed, yeah.
Another of the risk mitigations we're looking at in the future
is that, you know that the implant has a certain size, the
depth of the bottom of the implant actually thinner than
the average human skull. And So what we want to be able
to do is control the size of the gap under the implant if the
threads that travel from the implant into the brain as much
slack as possible. We didn't do this in the first
participant because we didn't want to, you know, manipulate
any of their tissue that we didn't absolutely have to in
upcoming implants, our plan is to or sculpt the surface of the
skull very intentionally to minimize the gap under the
implant such that the bottom of the implant travels perfectly
flush with the normal contour of the inner side of the skull.
That will put the implant closer to the brain, will eliminate
some of the tension on the threads and we think it will
reduce some of the tendency of threads to retract, right and.
We actually built the tool to do right.
Yeah, this is, this is actually, this is a very important detail.
You really want the the inner contour of the skull to be flush
so that the implant doesn't, there's no, the brain doesn't
want to pucker up into the into the gap.
That's really quite a big deal. So like like minimizing the air
pocket and the implant being flush with the the inside
contour of the skull is are two very important improvements.
The additional benefit here is that you know you do see some
amount of stick up what we call stick UPS.
So you minor bump in the head, but this actually eliminates it
even. Further, Yeah, yeah, I mean,
it's like really our goal is that that if you run your hand
over the top of the skull, you don't feel any, any bump, you
don't feel any, any device. And that even if someone was
bald, you wouldn't really even notice it.
And and then from the the inner inner contour of the skull that
the the brain or physical standpoint doesn't really notice
that there's a divot in the skull because there's no divot.
OK. Another aspect of the of the
human brain that you know, obviously differs from any of
the animals that we tested in is that the human brain is a lot
bigger. And so you may not realize that
that means that the human brain moves quite a bit more than any
of these other smaller brained creatures.
And so when we open the skull, we see the brain travel toward
and away from the robot, about 3mm in total as the heart beats
and and the breathing takes place.
And so that movement, you know, it, it adds a small challenge
for the robot in precisely choosing a depth to insert each
thread. It's not an enormous challenge.
And we've already upgraded the robots capabilities to be able
to even more precisely target depth in in even a very rapidly
moving brain with a high amplitude of movement.
You may think the most obvious mitigation for threads that
pulled out of the brain is to insert them deeper.
We think so too. And so we're going to broaden
the range of depths at which we insert threads.
So you know, for the very first participant, we had an enormous
amount of data from our animal work and we had very highly
optimized our insertion depth to maximize the crossing of layers
of interest in the cortex with the electrodes that were
recording from. Now that we know retraction is a
possibility, we're going to insert at a variety of depths
that even in several cases of differing amounts of retracting
threads, we're going to have electrodes at the proper depth
and with the deepest threads be able to track how much
retraction has occurred across the surface of the brain from
from each thread. And so we're going to, you know,
both have more threads in the right layer and have better data
on how much retraction has occurred.
If you're ABCI nerd, you might know that being able to control
individual Z depth per thread is not something that most neural
interface devices offer. Most neural interface devices
are kind of a static, fixed, rigid array that you push in and
all the electrodes are on depth. To be able to do this is
actually pretty pretty novel. Part of the robot.
Yeah, the historical approach is to actually pound in a sort of
bed of nails with an air hammer into the.
Brain, It looks crazy that that that is.
Yeah, just with a with a pneumatic hammer.
That's the this is it sounds kind of somewhat barbaric.
This is not what we do, but this is what's been done before is
literally just hammering in what looks like a better nails with
the brain, which actually works. It's astonishing that it
actually works. But I mean, some people like
manual, like DBS probes, you're just sticking in by hand.
Our research is just guiding them in.
Those are several, several orders of magnitude more volume
of brain tissue that you're destroying compared to what
we're doing. But that deep brain simulation
stuff does actually work, and it actually helps people a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great product.
Yeah. I mean, I think we'll we'll be
able to do a much more finessed version of that down the road.
So I mean, it's really difficult like the, the the neural link
device is something that really absolutely minimizes damage to
the brain, absolutely minimizes the load on the patient.
And the goal is to allow someone to live a completely normal
life. They work that you won't even
notice that someone even has the device.
So like I said, we're restoring the ability to control your
computer and phone. That's how telepathy and then
next device being able to allow people to see that cannot see
before. And in fact, you could you could
allow people to see kind of like Dora the Forge in Star Trek in
any what? Whatever.
Infrared. Yeah, infrared, ultraviolet
radar. So.
So I think another way of saying it is that we want to give
people superpowers. So it's not just that we're
restoring your prior brain functionality, but that you
actually have functionality far greater than a normal human.
That's a super big deal. And I also think, you know,
often times the questions that we get a lot is why do you have
to actually go into the brain? What if you place it on the
surface or outside the skull? Basically the Long story short,
the physics of how it works, you really need to get the sensors,
which are these facing in the brain next to the source which
you're on as close to it as possible.
Otherwise what you get is you get a population response and
not be able to kind of do the level of control that we believe
of. Yeah, I mean, a good sort of
analogy would be like if you're trying to understand what goes
on in a factory, you kind of need to go into the factory.
You can't just put a stethoscope on the wall and try to figure
out what's going Like anything on the outside of the trying to
read things from the outside is like putting a stethoscope on
the wall of a factory, trying to understand what's going in the
factory. It's not going to be effective.
You got to be threads. You got to be in there.
So. But I just want to be emphasized
again, like the goal is to give people superpowers, not just to
restore prior functionality. So it's very exciting.
And I think that should give hope to a lot of people in the
world that the future is going to be exciting and inspiring and
the technology is going to give them superpowers.
I mean, that's that's amazing. Yeah, I guess it.
Is. Off yeah and and could can you
multitask but yeah in fact if you look at Nolan's streaming
and you can just check out Nolan's streams on on the X
platform he's multitasking all the time so he's playing video
games while talking and. Listening to podcasts?
Nice listening to podcasts. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So it's really just like if
you're using your hands and you can be, you know, playing a
video game while talking so. I mean, don't take that word for
it. Just go watch.
I mean, yeah, yeah, he's out there on the Internet doing his
thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So can he do keyboard shortcuts or is it just the mouse?
Yeah, that's actually what we're working on right now.
Sure, so currently he's working with the mouse, but we are also
exploring and decoding more dimensions from the new
activity. Multiple clicks.
So to do shortcuts or just able to control more games, control
games with an Xbox controller. But also in the future we
expand, we plan to expand to decode text, not just the mouse
control, but also allow our participant to type much faster.
And yeah. Yeah, actually.
So maybe going back to the discussion of thread retraction,
you know, one of the very exciting parts to me about this
story is that we're able to do so much with 15% of channels.
You have more channels. What that actually offers you is
not just faster mouse control, because in the motor cortex,
neurons don't all represent the same thing.
So if you're trying to understand, like, you know, what
an individual finger is trying to do, you might or might not
have an Electro next to it. And the more channels you have
in the brain, the higher likelihood you have, you know,
representation or decodability of all fingers on the hand.
It's like you're trying to do something like output text at a
fast rate. It's something that matters a
lot for people who are completely locked in, who cannot
speak at all, who are trying to, you know, just say I love you to
them, to a loved one in their family or ask for a glass of
water or a scratch or whatever. You know, being able to type at
a faster rate is extremely important.
And the more fingers you have access to, higher probability.
You can do that officially. And so yeah, you know, I'm super
excited about high, how high the ceiling is you can that we can
get to as we resolve this standard traction issue.
Yeah, I mean we're like we're currently at approximately 1010
bits per second P great. But ultimately we want to get to
megabit and I think ultimately whole brain interface I think
you know, many years from now I think Gigabit level as possible.
So that's that's pretty astonishing.
You know, with this is still version one of our device.
As we mentioned, it's version one with only 15% of the threads
working. The the current device has 64
threads with 16 electrodes on each thread.
Our next device has 128 threads with with eight electrodes per
per thread. Because as we get more confident
about how, where exactly to place the, the electrode the the
thread, you, you need fewer electrodes per thread.
So we can essentially with the current with without substantial
changes, potentially double the bandwidth if if we are accurate
with the placement of of the threads and then our next
generation device will have maybe even.
More channels. Yeah, yeah.
So yeah. So next device for every four,
yeah, 3000 channels. So this will just keep getting
better and better really moving up I think in towards magnitude
in factors of 10 basically in in what kind of bandwidth.
So I think won't be, it won't be all that long before someone
with a neural link device can communicate faster than someone
who is has a fully functional body.
And yeah, so I think, you know, faster than the fastest speed
typist or auctioneer. The E sports tournaments are
going to be. Like you literally won't be able
to speak faster than someone can communicate with a neural link
telepathy device. It may be a very interesting
part of this. Basically we currently connect
to standard inputs to the computer through mouse and
keyboards, but very soon, as we will have a much broader
bandwidth, we need to think about new ways to actually build
the interface for their devices. This is something that we can't
accept. Yeah.
No, that's, that's a good point because the, the current input
devices are centered around human hands.
So it's like we've got these, you know, little meat sticks
that we move and there's a certain rate at which you can
move your move your fingers. And so we've got like the mouse
and the keyboard and with a joystick control, you know, like
Xbox controller or something like that.
But you really don't need that. You can actually, you don't.
You don't need, since you're no longer if you're, if you're not
trying to use your hands, you don't, you actually don't need
those conventional control mechanisms.
And so This is why like, ultimately I think you'll be
able to do conceptual telepathy like where you can communicate
entire concepts uncompressed to someone else with a neural link
or to the computer. Even today we have some problems
here where like, you know, if you don't feel the mouse
clicking under your finger, how do you know it actually
happened? Because you know, you're, you're
seeing it on the screen, but you don't actually feel the mouse
clip. You don't have the
proprioceptive feedback of, you know, the keys under your
fingertips or the trackpad under your.
There's all sorts of interesting UX challenges, how to actually
give the user some sense of what their decoder is actually doing
or what the Neuralink is actually doing.
I mean, they're trying to use. So wireless.
Yeah, it's Bluetooth. Just a Bluetooth connection,
just like how your normal Apple mouse or like Apple Magic
Keyboard connects to your computer.
Same exact thing, in fact in. Yeah, we can basically have this
exposed as an HID interface if we want.
HID is just the name of the protocol for like sending bits
from a mouse into a computer. Yeah, I can plug into basically
anything. Yeah.
I mean, I think we, we chose that interface because it's
ubiquitous. Yeah, basically any devices are
are we have Bluetooth capabilities.
Our our long term goal is to actually have our own protocol,
you know that is safe and secure.
But for now, you know we've chosen it for interoperability.
So the question is can a neural link chip repair the paralysis
in the long term? You know, we can't do that right
now. We have done sort of preliminary
work implanting a second neural link in the spinal cord and we
can restore naturalistic looking hand and leg movements in animal
models. But this isn't something that
is, you know, don't, don't hold your breath waiting for it.
It's going to be a while. We've got a lot of work to do.
But yes, there's no reason in theory that we can't repair
paralysis. Yeah.
I mean essentially to to, I mean it there's, there's no, there's
no physics barrier to fully solving paralysis.
That is perhaps a way to say it, that you've got signals coming
from your motor cortex that if they are transferred past the
point where the the nerves are damaged, essentially just it's
basically a communications bridge.
So you bridge the communications from the motor cortex past the
the point in the neck or spine where the nose are damaged.
And you should like it is physics.
It is possible from a physics standpoint to restore full body
functionality from a physics standpoint, it's a very hard
technical problem, but it, but it is, there is nothing that
prevents it happening from a physics standpoint.
So in terms of next phase of the rollout, well, we, we really
want to make sure that we, we make as much progress as
possible between each neural link a patient.
So this is, we're only just moving now to our second neural
link patient, but we, we hope to have, you know, if, if, if
things go well, high single digits this year.
And I don't know, maybe this is somewhat dependent on regulatory
approval and how how much technical progress we make, but
within a few years, hopefully thousands.
Yeah. And I think one thing that is
important to highlight is that, you know, it's not that we built
only one device and one surgery. We've done hundreds of surgery.
We've built thousands and thousands of devices even for
just the the ability to unearth any sort of low frequency
failure mode. So we have already been
investing very heavily in infrastructure to be able to
scale this thing on the device manufacturing side as well as on
the surgery side of things. We want to be able to help as
many people as quickly as we go through obviously the
appropriate hurdles that are regulatory challenges and
proving out the device with. Yeah, and the the device
implantation really needs to become almost entirely if not
entirely automatic in the same way that's a LASIK.
Eye surgery is done, you know, you don't have an
ophthalmologist with a laser cutter by hand that that would
be crazy. But the ophthalmologist overseas
the LASIK machine and make sure that the settings are correct
and then the machine does everything and restores your
eyesight. It's really remarkable how how
many people have had their eyesight restored with with
LASIK. And I think there's another one
called Smile. It's they they keep making it
better. We need to have something
similar for a Neuralink implantation so that you
basically sit down and whatever the, the, whatever kind of
upgrades or, you know, brain fixes are needed.
That's that's reviewed by medical expert.
Obviously we want to make sure that that is reviewed correctly,
but but it really needs to be automatic.
So you sit down and, and within 10 minutes you have a newer like
device installed very, very fast.
I mean, it's very sort of cyberpunk, you know, Deus Ex if
you played those games. When we'll start to interface
with other devices like wheelchair, it's a great
question. We're currently focusing on
controlling computers and unlock independence in the virtual
world. Of course, our plan is, as we
mentioned earlier, robotic arm and wheelchair to unlock
independence in the physical world.
This of course additional risk if you make your computer,
there's some additional risk to that, but we are working with
the FDA to allow us to be quite some.
Well, it seems like if if the wheelchair has an.
App. Well, the wheelchair just needs
to have an interface. It does, yeah.
So if if the wheelchair has a Bluetooth interface, you could
just Bluetooth interface to the wheelchair.
And and that's probably something we should do.
We're working on pretty soon, yeah.
It's really a matter of paperwork.
I'm showing that you can do it safely.
You don't want to drive off. A Cliff.
Well, I think we could. Well, we can limit the speed.
Yeah, Yeah. So it doesn't go careening off
into disaster, but you know, so just make it go slowly at first.
But yeah, so being able to sort of it really the New York device
just should work generally for anything that's got a Bluetooth
interface. Including potentially, an
Optimus. Yes, yeah, you're, yes, you
could communicate with Optimus. Yep, absolutely.
Optimus, we'll also be able to talk to optimists.
But like, but you could just, yeah, instead of talking just,
you could just beam it directly. Or if, if someone has lost the
use of speech, then, then they can still communicate to an
optimist. They can communicate
telepathically to Optimists or by Bluetooth.
And, and, and so even if someone has, you know, completely lost
the ability to speak, they could still control optimists or their
computer or phone. You know, also like if you have
an optimist and you have a neuron, you can just directly
map the brain signal to control of the physical arm of the
robot. And that's a very meaningful
thing. Like if you're, you know, folks
that have spinal cord injury, one of the biggest requests is
to be able to scratch yourself. It's something that quite
annoying actually. And if you have a scratch on
your face, you can't fall asleep until you scratch it.
You know, it's very convenient to be able to move something
physically towards you, to be able to scratch similar things
like eating food. You know, if you need somebody
to feed you very hard to have dinner with friends in a way
that is, you know, sort of a normal social experience.
And so if you can feed yourself, pick up a fork and actually eat
a piece of chicken on your own, you know, that's a big deal.
It prevents and saves a lot of interactions with caretakers and
other people in your life that you rely on to take care of it,
But it really increases you. I think an exciting possibility
long term also is to say if you take parts of the Optimus
Optimus humanoid robot and you combine that with a neural link,
let's say somebody has lost their arms or legs.
Well, we, we could actually attach an optimist arm or
optimist legs and do a neural link implant so that the, the
motor commands from your brain that go would go to your
biological arms. Now go to your robot arms or
robot legs. And again, you you'd have
basically cybernetic superpowers.
Actually, so the latency from the neural link to your hand
would probably be slightly faster than it is just to go to
your physical hand. So you can imagine like if
you're a piano player or AI don't know anything that
requires extremely fast, you know, hand movements that you
could actually have a pretty imbalanced right hand robotic
arm control versus left hand physical arm control because one
of them. Yeah, like I said, it's just
kind of a cyberpunk day of sex in the future where you have
cybernetic upgrades that are actually better than your
biological limbs. And it's certainly the, we'll
have a much, you know, as particularly as we expand to a
large number of of, of customers or patients for Neurolink, the
understanding of the brain will improve dramatically because
really there isn't a fine, very fine grained understanding of
the brain today because the, it's just the sensors aren't
good enough. You've got fMRI, which is pretty
good, but it's still not as good as actually having high
bandwidth electrodes in the brain.
Yeah, I think this is under appreciated as a research tool
to to move that whole effort forward of really knowing, you
know, what the physical substance of human thought is.
We don't know to the to the degree that we need to.
So Neuralink is actually a very powerful research tool.
Yeah, I mean, we, I think we can ultimately understand and and
fix it's quite severe psychosis or like if if somebody's got
like the if somebody's got like a.
Like a delusion that they have a chip in their brain, I.
Was. Wondering if you were going to
mention that one. We just want to be clear,
there's only one person with a new linked chip in their brain.
So for people out there who think we've put a chip in their
brain, we'd like to assure you or what it's worth, you probably
won't believe us, but we did not put a chip in your brain.
OK, So there's actually a remarkable number of people who
think we have put a chip in their brain, but we have not.
But in the future, if you would like us to put a chip in your
brain, which will perhaps help with the issue of thinking that
you have a chip in your brain, then we will be able to do so.
So there are people that have severe schizophrenia.
They've got basically things that their brain is
malfunctioning in some way. And, and this is actually due to
really like physical circuitry issues.
You can think of the brain as like really it's a, it's, it's a
biological computer. And if, if some of the circuits
are crossed, it's going to, you know, it's going to crash or
it's going to have issues that was not work.
But with a Neuralink device, we can fix those issues and, you
know, give someone who I think has to say severe schizophrenia
or or psychosis of some kind, allow them to live a normal
life. I think that is one of the
likely things in the future. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, you can
certainly imagine, like, I'm sure people have like, parents,
grandparents who've, you know, have memory that's not working
as well as it used to be. Sometimes they forget who who
their grandchildren are or what day it is.
And this is something that on your linked device could help
fix I. Mean that that's actually one of
the personal reasons in in in many way like forms of you're
you're literally losing your and then part of your item, which is
a just a very, very. Yeah.
And it's really just, it's a glitch in the biological
computer that is a fixable glitch like, like it's a short
circuit essentially. How does the device charge and
how long does the charge last? Yeah.
So the current version that Nolan has, it lasts but four to
five hours on a single charge, and it takes about 45 minutes to
charge. The thing we've learned from
Nolan is that that's actually one of the main limiters for him
using it more. It's actually pretty hard to use
a product more than like 70 hours a week.
But that's about what he has used it for in some weeks.
Yeah, 70 hours in a week, Yeah. I mean, just for context, like
you sleep roughly 8 hours a night.
So that's, you know, we're doing better than the bed.
Like the bed is 56 hours a week if you use roughly.
And so 70 hours a week if uses. I challenge you to think about
products that you've actually used for that duration.
But that's again, some of these points are worth like
emphasizing again, like the that Nolan, our first neural link
recipient, has used the neural link device for 70 hours in a
week, which is incredible. He probably won't enjoy the time
sharing his computer use publicly, but I.
Mean. I assure use for productive
things only, but actually so one of the things we've learned is
that in the next version of the device we really need to like
double or you know, increase that battery life.
And so I think DJ, the next version is going to be double.
Actually. Actually double.
Without without increasing the charge.
Correct in charging time to double the battery life, meaning
you should get roughly 8 hours of use.
And the goal is to actually get to all they use so you can just
charge maybe in your sleep or your sleeping pillow.
Exactly. As soon as you've got like 16
hours of usage, then you basically have 24 hours of usage
because it can charge while you're sleeping.
One of the things that's important, I think, to call out
here is if you're paralyzed, you can't, you know, put the charger
over your head yourself. And so it's important to think
about like it's not just a duration of better use, but also
can you recharge it yourself independently.
So we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make that
feasible because then that means that you can, this is what no
one does. You can use the device, charge
it, use the device, charge it, use the device without needing
anybody to come in and sort of help you with that, which is a
big deal if you're trying to play save until 5:00 AM at night
when your family's asleep. And the way in which he does
that is that there is a charger coil that's a big or you know
about this big, and we actually put it in the sleeve of a of a
hat. Like a beanie.
Or a beanie and then he wears it and then says with the voice
command charge. Charger energized.
That's the one he. Likes.
How would writing work? So so yeah, the current device
that Nolan has is reading. So it's trying to read his
essentially like worst movement from from one one hand.
That's also, you know, with pointing out like in the future,
like we're pretty cool to you can roll into a second implant
that would allow the other hand to be used and also have higher,
obviously higher active electrode count.
So then you can play two essentially play games two
handed because that's normally how you play games.
And but then with with writing, it's really just it's an
electrical impulse instead of like reading electrical impulses
from the neuron to you issue an electrical impulse, which is
obviously critical for vision. So vision is, is writing, which
is just triggering an electrical impulse in the vision part of
the brain and that like activates a pixel.
So we actually do have this working in monkeys.
So we had we've had it working with monkeys for a while now
where you can sort of flash a pixel and then you watch where
the monkey, obviously the monkey's like, what monkey's a
little surprised to see like, hey, there's a flash here and a
flash here, but it's gets used to it after a while.
But it just you can you can see that that the pixel is in the
right location because the monkey's eyes will dark to that
location. It's not on the screen, like
there's no pixel on the. Screen.
There's no pixel on the screen. Yeah, just like.
You just verify that that the that you're triggering a pixel
in the right part of the brain. So, you know, the initial
resolution for vision will be relatively low, you know, sort
of Atari graphics type of thing. But over time, it could
potentially be better than normal vision.
And then I guess in terms of some additional applications for
where writing to the brain can be useful order applications as
Bliss mentioned there is. Feedback.
There's a proprioceptive feedback, there's a tactile
feedback. Especially for a robot arm, Like
if you're trying to grasp a call right, you need to know you've
got it. Yeah, 1 to one egg.
It's an egg, Yeah. It's a very much a delicate
balance of not just initiating the movement, but getting the
feedback and controlling it accordingly.
So there there is a some meta sensory cortex that's right
adjacent to motor cortex that could could be benefit.
Motor movements, so any changes in neural growth after device is
inserted, we don't see any any signs of neural damage.
But I and I guess we, we have seen some rebound on some of the
electrodes, right? Correct.
And then also, I mean, I guess, I guess the brain is very
plastic. So it's not that plastic.
Well, it does diminish quite a bit after each 10/20.
Throughout childhood, especially when you get to about 25 rain,
really done cooking. Yeah.
But there are, There is a little bit of damage done with each
insertion, but it's a miniscule amount compared to anything else
out there. And so it's an easy amount of
damage recover from. And it's really only detectable
on cutting pieces of the brain after after the animal's no
longer alive and looking at them under a microscope, you can't
really tell during life that there's been any brain.
And another way to interpret this question, have there any
changes in neural growth after the device is inserted?
One way to interpret that is like the user learning how to
use the device. And I think on that side of
things, there's been tremendous progress.
He's put in hundreds of hours trying to figure out the best
way to use this device because he really thinks that, you know,
if he can figure this out, he can help share this knowledge.
I mean, he's like on Friday night at 8:00 PM, you know, he's
starting a session of like, you know, figuring out himself how
to how to push his own performance to the next level.
And that's really a unique learning process because there's
not many people in the world that have had the experience of
moving something. And.
So there's a lot of nuance to like, OK, how exactly should I
imagine or attempt to move my wrist to get the thing to Yeah,
he's really dialed that into a. Also, just the sheer number of
hours that he's even in the past six months, right?
In many ways, like, I mean, he's using it in his travel in his
plane, right? Effectively, PCI has left the
lab. Yeah.
Yeah, one of the questions is how close we're converting
thoughts into text. I mean, right, Right now it's
more about moving cursed from the screen on on a virtual
keyboard, but long term you should be able to really
estimate entire words faster than anyone could possibly type.
I'm able to type Hello World today but we're still in the
early days making that a posh experience.
I mean, the other things that we're looking at is sign
language, right? At the end of the day, it is a
movement of and into, right? Yeah, it's true.
Was the brain trying to naturally push the threads out?
I mean, this is sort of a universal feature of any implant
in the body. The body tries to reject it.
And the goal of the surgeons and the technology team is to fight
that. And so with artificial hips and
with, you know, screws in the spine, we've done a really good
job of finding biocompatible materials and techniques to fix
those implants in the body. I mean, past a certain age, it's
getting hard to find someone without some kind of implant,
you know, knee, hip, some kind of screws in their spine.
And so we've got this problem pretty well solved.
So to answer your question, yes, the body is trying to get rid of
any implant, but we can ensure that basically can't.
It's also worth highlighting that the threads have not
actually moved in the past five months.
There's, there's some still minor movements in terms of like
some maybe, maybe getting pushed in a little bit, pushed out a
little bit, but it's, it's more or less very stable and been
stable for. And the reason for that is, you
know, once you, once you do a brain surgery, it takes some
time for the tissues to come in and then, and then you know, the
art tissue or the neo membrane to actually come in and then
anchor the threats in place. And once that happens,
everything has been stable and seen much movement.
That's where the world record performance starts to come.
In Yeah, that was a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, the threats, like it is important that the threats be
extremely tiny. If they're extremely tiny, then
the brain does not. The smaller they are, the less
likely the brain is to react to to them.
So that's why you want the threats to be extremely tiny and
also to minimize any damage to neurons, so.
On that note, we do plan to actually share some of the, you
know, the tissue response in detail and some of the the later
upcoming updates. Yeah, it is quite a challenging,
it's challenging on many fronts to do something like this
because you're, you're trying to read and read and write
electrical signals, but you need to have the, the threads
themselves need to be like electrically isolated and and
not subject to corrosion in the body.
So like the, you know, just metal by itself is somewhat
subject to corrosion or, or being attacked.
So it's it's, it's like in terms of the various coatings and
things to actually make this electrode work while not
actually eroding it's performance over time is, is
very difficult. Human bodies are very, very
harsh environment, very harsh environment.
It's a, it's a bag of salt water with bad sensors that's elevated
temperature that is well regulated.
I mean, I'm sure people have experienced dropping their
electronic devices in the sea water and in an instant.
Yeah, yeah. So we're going to sort of wrap
this up soon if there's like a few few last questions, I guess.
So a good question. So what about upgrades?
So yeah, we do think it's going to be important to be able to
upgrade the device over time, just like you wouldn't want like
an iPhone 1 stuck in your brain forever.
You know, if you've got an iPhone 15, you probably want the
iPhone 15, not the iPhone 1. So I think triple over time will
be able to upgrade their, their neural link.
So we'll take the neural link device out and put a new one in.
And we, we have done this with some of our animals and they're
actually in one case we did with we, we upgraded device three
times and and with a pig. We did with a monkey as well.
He's able to do PCI. Yeah.
And he's, he's doing fine, Yeah. Pedro has the pedest implant.
Actually, he hit his, I think his record with the last.
Yeah, with the with an upgrade. So it still beat him though
Will. It still beat him.
Yes, this is true. Humans are top of the species
leaderboard right now. Pedro's like what, like eight or
something? Pedro's like 8.5 BPS, OK, but
it's a very high score. Yeah.
I'm not trying to put Pedro down.
And also to train a monkey to do that, It's like a whole
challenge on its own. We have like the best animal
care team. Yeah, just do 1/2 size.
We, we, we, we do our absolute best to take care of the, the
animals. And when we had like a USDA
inspector come through, she said that this was the, the nicest
animal facility she's ever seen in her entire life.
So breakfast. On an app like.
The the, the monkey orders room service.
Yes, yeah, we've we've we've monkey room service, which is
rare. We're the only ones who offer
monkey room service. So we really do everything we
can to maximize the welfare of the animals.
So all right, with that, thank you everyone for tuning in.
Hope you found this interesting.